Earth, Wind and Hydro

...Who's fooling who: here's the FIRE (Deepwater Horizon style).

Click image at right to stream a CBC Radio report I heard this past weekend emphasizing the use of protective respirators in the cleanup. -->

Wish I could disconnect what's currently going on in the Gulf of Mexico from this blog piece, but I think that would be impossible.

You see, in a previous life, I was a Mechanical Engineer working directly for the U.S. Federal Government. A very small fish on the federal "GS" pay-scale totem poll, for sure. However, one of my small-fry ideas, a Small Business Innovation Request (SBIR) proposal I came up with back in 2006 - intended by me to help my military laboratory under consideration for the federal "BRAC" closure list stay open and relevant - was to develop technology useful to private companies to assist in the safe undersea extraction of increasingly hard-to-get oil.

I organized multiple meetings - involving myself and my senior colleagues - where an expert, an engineer with multiple U.S. patents who had formerly worked for Shell Oil Company (a Dutch guy who had moved to Florida for the nice weather) - pitched technology to us that had been tweaked and proven during exploration and successful drilling of oil off the coast of Nigeria. At the same time, I was also (and still am) a member of the New York State Green Party, in large part, for environmental reasons.

Click on Real Player undersea image for British Petroleum's live stream from the Gulf of Mexico (pun definitely intended!).

Hydro, Baby, Hydro!

My personal path to green stems first from a youthful Apollo-era fascination with outer space and NASA's energy conservation technology on spacecraft. Later, exchange-student friends during high school in the early 80's - from Germany, Yugoslavia, Denmark, and Sweden - and later visits to their homes across Europe, gave me a strong understanding of how differently energy is consumed in the U.S. versus abroad.

Knowing these energy consumption differences informed my listening as James Besha, President of Albany Engineering Corporation, gave his May 6th Troy, New York presentation, "Hydroelectric Power: Lessons from the Past, Models for the Future".

<-- Until 1989: Ford Motor Company's Green Island Radiator & Spring Plant. James Besha shared a story of Charles Steinmetz and Henry Ford camping-out nearby and deciding to locate Ford's hydro-powered facility here.

Over thirty attendees - comprised of working and retired engineers and scientists (including GlobalSpec.com colleagues), Hudson Valley Community College (HVCC) engineering-science students, college faculty, as well as interested members of the public - were on-hand for Mr. Besha's fascinating 1.5 hour presentation, which followed a dinner social for most of those in attendance. I personally organized this PDH-credit (for licensed Civil and Mechanical engineers) event, as part of my ongoing service commitment to the Hudson-Mohawk section of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME H-M).

During his presentation, Jim - a native of the Albany region - described multiple New York Capital Region projects he and his company have worked on or plan to. They span as far south as Styvesant Falls (near Hudson), and northward to Mineville (near Lake Champlain). Included were the Mechanicville Hydroelectric Plant (3 MW w/ plans to upgrade to 17 MW), Styvesant Falls (Kinderhook Creek - 1.8 million KWH), Green Island Hydroelectric Plant (Former Ford Radiator Plant), Cohoes Falls (100 MW), and Mineville.

Many of these plants, along with their integrated mechanical technology like water turbines and generators, were built over 100 years ago, and retain much of their original mechanical components. Metal shafts with over a billion mechanical cycles - manufactured per an engineer's 100+ year vision - amazingly continue to function and produce clean power for their communities, a testament to the far-sighted vision of American mechanical designers of the late 1800's / early 1900's. Jim pointed out that many Capital Region hydroelectric plants were abandoned in the early-to-mid 1900's, as newer technologies like coal and oil power became more popular for larger populations and more centralized power production. Only now is there a renewed interest in restoring many of these abandoned sites.

Unfinished American Business of the Early 1970s

Just a week and a half before Jim's hydro presentation, the Deepwater Horizon explosion occurred in the Gulf of Mexico. This coincidence, from what I observed, definitely focused everyone's minds during the presentation, and may have accounted for our good attendance.

Jim's presentation was a bit of Back to the Future for me, since technology from the past, like a hydro-powered, electrified street trolley (with a third exposed rail) between Styvesant Falls and Rensselaer County, is being talked about again in 2010!

During Jim's talk, I couldn't help but be reminded of 1973. In response to the first (first in my personal memory) Oil Crisis, the U.S. government's response was to use NASA to develop technology capable of weaning the U.S. off of imported oil. Skylab - the International Space Station's technological parent - used solar panels intended to serve as prototype examples for spin-off technologies folks would soon see integrated into their own homes.

Sadly, this never really scaled up the way folks promoting this technology in the seventies had hoped. Cheap imported oil that lasted from the 1980's until recently explains this for the most part. However, with the recent spike of $5 gas at the pumps, there is renewed interest.

The Way Forward for Jobs & Energy?: An Upstate New York Community College prepares a 21st Century Workforce

Fast forward to 2008, and the perfect storm of high oil prices, a teetering economy, and a declining New York and U.S. manufacturing base. Investors from around the world, including billions of dollars from New York State taxpayers, take a large bet on the future and see alternative energy development and semiconductor chip fabrication as the way forward.

TEC-SMART stands for "Training and Education Center for Semiconductor Manufacturing and Alternative and Renewables Technologies".

Hudson Valley Community College (Troy, New York) builds and co-locates its "TEC-SMART" satellite training facility in a location near to AMD / GlobalFoundries private chip fabrication project in Malta, New York.

Click on images to launch YouTube videos of CR4's blog team touring the TEC-SMART facility in Malta, New York.

- Larry Kelley

Resources:

http://sections.asme.org/hudson-mohawk/2010_May_Newsletter_v3.pdf

British Petroleum's "Live Stream"

"Keeping Them Honest" - CNN's Anderson Cooper: http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/

BP Disaster discussion at BBC World Service's One Planet radio program

http://www.albanyengineering.com/

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/watervliet.htm

https://www.hvcc.edu/tecsmart/

CR4 Tours TEC-SMART (Part 1): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_oYvbLBTR8

CR4 Tours TEC-SMART (Part 2): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCu-_4eSnfo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalfoundries

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Island,_New_York#Green_Island_Power_Authority

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_lab

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill

Marine Biologist & Exxon Valdez Disaster Expert Dr. Riki Ott interviewed for the May 30th broadcast of CBC Radio's The Sunday Edition program