Interest is churning for hydroelectric power

updated 4:15 p.m. ET Nov. 30, 2008

HAMILTON, Ohio - Many decades ago, cost-conscious Henry Ford turned to hydroelectric plants to power his car factories like the one by the Great Miami River, near this Cincinnati suburb. That assembly plant is long gone, but the power plant and the technology behind it isn't.

Far from it. The push to get electricity from moving water is only picking up steam.

There is mounting political pressure to get more energy from alternative sources and developers are pushing ambitious projects to exploit America's biggest rivers for power.

"Some of these applications have been around for decades, but there's renewed interest now," said Jeff Hawk, spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Pittsburgh district. "We've seen a spurt of applications; we're busier now than ever."

A new generation of low-impact hydroelectric plants is expected to light up the Ohio River Valley. Along the Mississippi River, a city and a small startup firm have separate hopes of harnessing that artery's energy potential either through a few big turbines or thousands of tiny, submerged ones.

Water is already the leading renewable energy source used by utilities to generate electric power.

The recent credit crisis has not been a concern for most.

"One thing that is certain is that this will pass," said Dan Irvin, behind one of the ventures planned for the Mississippi River. "If you were financing any energy project at the moment, you'd have your hands full. But we're looking out far enough, and we carry conservative enough assumptions, that we feel very comfortable."

American Municipal Power-Ohio is a nonprofit wholesale power supplier for 123 municipal systems in Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and Michigan. It already owns a hydro plant on the Ohio River and is involved in developing five more.

In Hamilton, Ohio, where the Ford plant once stood, the city bought the hydro power plant in 1963, acquired a second one on the Ohio River a few years later and may soon build another just upriver from Cincinnati.

Hydro gives the 30,000 customers of the city-owned utility the lowest electricity rate in Ohio, and officials think that Hamilton can become virtually all-hydro.

The price tag: $450 million over 40 years.

"The cost is in construction. Once the project's built, that's it," said Linda Church Ciocci, executive director of the National Hydropower Association, a Washington-based trade group. "There's no fuel cost associated with hydropower."

Hamilton's 30,000 residential customers pay 9.7 cents per kilowatt-hour, a couple cents more than the average in Washington state, where 70 percent of its electricity comes from hydropower.

There are 20 navigation and flood control dams on the Ohio River along its 981 miles from Pittsburgh to Cairo, Ill. Hydro plants at six of the dams already are producing electricity, with a generating capacity of more than 300 megawatts; four more that have been licensed would double that perhaps be on line in 2013.

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