Hydropower is quietly producing 20% of the world’s electricity with zero emissions

One Dam Thing After Another For The Hydropower Industry

carbonfree.co.uk 6th March 2008

According to Bourne Energy, while the major renewables, solar and wind power, are growing at double digits they still make up less than 1% of the country’s total energy output. The world must find clean sources of power that can be developed on a fast track. Bourne Energy has developed just such a renewable energy system which is described on their new website: http://www.bourneenergy.com/.

After extensive research, Bourne Energy has targeted hydropower as the most likely clean energy source to develop on a global scale. Hydropower is as cheap as coal, which is a major source of global warming emissions. Today, while coal is producing 40% of the world’s electricity; hydropower is quietly producing 20% of the world’s electricity with zero emissions. And many energy analysts now believe coal resources are far less than originally projected while only 4% of the world’s estimated potential hydropower resources have been harnessed.

Through the centuries hydropower has been dominated by the dam and reservoir configuration. But these large dam and reservoir projects, many built fifty or more years ago, are land intensive, environmentally unfriendly and are no longer cost-competitive to replicate today. Bourne’s solution is its RiverStar (Patent Pending) Kinetic Energy System, a “Power Company in a Box.” Place the self-contained energy module in river currents and it produces electricity from the harnessing of moving water in the river rather than the potential energy of water stored behind large dams. This technology has come about from the development of new materials, micro-power generation systems, hydrodynamic breakthroughs, improved structures and new power transmission, communication and control technologies.

Bourne’s RiverStar System is designed to tap the energy in thousands of miles of rivers that stretch across the globe. Over a million cubic meters per second discharge of water flow down the world’s major rivers every hour, every day, every year. Many stretches of these rivers are virtually unpopulated and undeveloped. The energy locked up in this enormous volume of moving fluid can be harnessed again and again.

Bourne’s novel approach does not require construction on the river bottom, which is both expensive and time-consuming. Construction, especially in industrialized countries, may also expose toxic materials, long hidden in the river sediments. Bourne’s proprietary low RPM turbines are specially designed to be safe for aquaculture. And the RiverStar power modules can access and tap the difficult areas where much of the world’s unharnessed hydropower is located. These kinetic energy modules are designed to be mass-produced in order to rapidly scale up this technology worldwide.

Bourne has also adapted its Kinetic Energy Systems to harness the world’s potential ocean power and tidal power resources in the form of its OceanStar (Patent Pending) and TidalStar (Patent Pending) systems. Bourne plans to have small demonstration power arrays operating in Asia, US and Europe within the next 12 months.