Release
Bourne Energy’s RiverStar BackPack Power Plant has the multi-functionality of a Swiss Army knife. Not only can it serve as a river power generator and a sustainable watermaker, but it can also operate as an energy regenerator when placed in the cooling system outflows of power utility and industrial plants.
Bourne Energy will display its portable renewable energy system at CleanTech Forum 2011 in San Francisco March 14-16. Bourne’s RiverStar BackPack Power Plant (RS-BPP) is the latest generation of hydrokinetic technology, a damless form of hydropower, that harnesses the natural flow of a river. It replaces large scale dam/reservoir construction with mass producible, self-contained “energy robots” placed directly in a river. There is no need for construction of heavy duty access roads, excavation or the use of explosives. Nor does the power site require special geological features needed for the construction of dams/reservoirs. Flowing water is the only prerequisite. Now hydropower can be scaled from hundreds of watts in backyard streams to megawatts in the world’s largest rivers. Hydropower is already the major renewable energy source producing almost 20% of global electricity. This new technology could potentially open up thousands of new hydropower sites worldwide.
Along with its quick installation, the BackPack Power Plant has the multi-functionality of a Swiss Army knife. Besides harnessing river energy it can power an internal or external reverse osmosis watermaker bringing affordable clean water to remote areas of Africa, Asia and South America. The unit can also operate as an energy regenerator when placed in the cooling system outflow canals of many of the nation’s 5,400 power plants as well as the outflow areas of many of the 16,000 water treatment plants. Keeping U.S. power on requires the electric sector to withdraw approximately 200 billion gallons of freshwater per day to cool the nation’s nuclear, coal and natural gas power plants. That is a huge amount of potential hydropower. The RS-BPP can also harness the moving water in the thousands of miles of water aqueduct canals worldwide. Further, solar panels can be integrated into the unit creating a hybrid solar-hydro power generator to harness both the hydro and solar power available along the hundreds of miles of water aqueducts in the American Southwest. The regenerator can be placed in the outfall areas of the 2,500 established hydropower dams to capture waste energy. The unit increases dam power output without requiring construction to enlarge reservoir or dam size. The RS-BPP can also produce power from many of the 80,000 non-hydropower dams in the world. It has applications in energy and water intensive industries including: power and water utilities, bottling plants, data centers, mining, pulp & paper, agriculture, semiconductors, textiles, metals production, chemicals, oil & gas and coal.
Application of the RS-BPP can not only produce clean power for many of the world’s developing world countries that most need it but also reuse waste energy in many industrial countries who are trying to reduce their carbon footprint.
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