Legacy Facilities and Future Technologies

By Kris Polly

In our November/December cover story, we look at a recent upgrade to the Bureau of Reclamation’s Palisades Dam, located on the South Fork of the Snake River in Idaho. The nearly 70‑year-old dam’s legacy hollow jet valves were replaced with new jet flow gates of exceptional size. In our interview with Jess Godfrey, Jay Jamison, and Kerry Strunk of Reclamation’s Upper Snake Field Office, we learn more about the project and its benefits.

Roger Line is the director of generation at Cloverland Electric Cooperative, which serves 34,000 residential and commercial members in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Unusually for a distribution cooperative, it owns its own generation, including a 124‑year-old hydroelectric plant in Sault Ste. Marie. In our interview, we learn more about what it takes to keep this valuable facility in top condition.

After that, we feature a fascinating technology developed by Italian firm Sizable Energy. Sizable has developed an offshore pumped storage technology that stores and dispatches energy by pumping a brine solution vertically between a floating reservoir and a seabed reservoir. Having completed trials in indoor wave basins and in the open sea, Sizable is moving rapidly toward commercialization.

Pend Oreille County Public Utility District boasts a proud history of providing affordable electricity to residential and industrial customers in rural northeastern Washington State. We speak with Director of Power Production Bryant Kramer and Public Information Officer Joe Hathaway about the maintenance and modernization of its hydropower facilities and its decisions about licensing and decommissioning.

Finally, we take a trip to the far side of the world in our conversation with Tom Marshall, a project manager and project engineer with Whessoe Lao who also manages the Lao Hydropower Platform, an online community that brings together people from across the hydropower sector in Laos. He gives us an overview of the projects underway in the country, Whessoe Lao’s capabilities, workforce issues, and more.

This issue features legacy facilities in Idaho, Michigan, and Washington that are still going strong thanks to excellent maintenance and prudent modernization. We also look at a country, Laos, where large-scale dam construction is ongoing. Finally, we glimpse the future of power storage and generation in Sizable Energy’s novel technology. With well-engineered solutions and painstakingly amassed expertise, the hydropower sector has been a mainstay of power production for decades—and this issue demonstrates that it will continue to support the grid for decades to come.

Kris Polly is the editor-in-chief of Hydro Leader magazine and the president and CEO of Water Strategies LLC, a government relations firm he began in February 2009 for the purpose of representing and guiding water, power, and agricultural entities in their dealings with Congress, the Bureau of Reclamation, and other federal government agencies. He may be contacted at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.