Video on Hydrokinetics

Here’s a video showing how a water wheel can generate electricity from a fast-running river.

Is this BS?  It depends on how you define “BS.”  It will generate electricity to be sure.

Will it do so cost-effectively?  Not in a million years, and that’s clear from the video itself.  It claims 7.5 KW at 50 RPM, but the wheel in the video (in this incredibly high velocity river) is doing about 12 RPM. Since power and speed are proportional, that means less than 2 KW, a fraction of that of a solar PV array on the typical American house.

Other issues include high maintenance costs and fish strikes.

 

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One comment on “Video on Hydrokinetics
  1. Scott McKie says:

    It will if you take the output, put it through an electronic chopper circuit, feed that into a series resonant circuit to kick the voltage up; feed that higher voltage into a resonant tank asn a pulsed input signal — and take that out.

    It’s called “over-unity” Craig, and according to guys who know, like the Physicists at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory — it works great.