BURNSHIRE HYDROELECTRIC LLC — Department of Agriculture SBIR Phase I: 8.6

Description

Hydropower is now increasingly operated outside of original design conditions due to changing water availability and environmental induced operating parameters. Fifty percent of operational hydroelectric dams in the United States are 50 years or older and nearly all were designed to operate steadily as a primary base load resource. Compounding these issues is the increasing prevalence of intermittent power producers such as wind and solar. Because hydropower has a relatively stable supply of "fuel", it can more easily ramp up or down power production quickly as intermittent producers add to or disappear from the power grid. Increasingly, hydropower generators are forced to cycle on and off to accommodate power grid congestion and this cycling results in excessive wear and tear to hydropower mechanical and electrical components.Standard turbines and generators were designed to operate steadily as baseload suppliers with a narrow range of design operations (water head, flow rate, and turbine speed). Operating outside of these parameters in a traditional generator setup results in poor quality power (voltage and frequency). Therefore, traditional generators must halt power production when design operating conditions do not exist. Modern power electronics will alleviate these problems by providing an electronic, non-mechanical mechanism to match power production to various water head and flow conditions. This project will quantify the range of scalable power achievable across varying flow conditions made possible with power electronics and new generation permanent magnet generators.By modulating head and flow at a typical hydropower site, this project will test and demonstrate that power electronics can internally maintain quality power production even under variable flow and head conditions. This would likely decrease additional wear and tear to hydropower drivetrain equipment while adding the ability to maintain power export when a typical generator would be forced offline. Once demonstrated and refined, the processes collected from this research will be deployable to sixty percent of all hydropower sites in the United States allowing greater distributed power generation. Adding the ability to operate under variable conditions will also allow hydroelectric sites to meet environmental and ecological demands while sharing the power grid other power producers.