| Small hydro Charbone concluded the final negotiations and


executed the Purchase and Sale Agreement on 17 January between its wholly owned subsidiary, Charbone Corporation USA, and Northwoods Hydropower Inc for the acquisition of all of the general partner and limited partner interests of Tower Kleber Limited Partnership (TKLP) a Michigan Limited Partnership and Black River Limited Partnership, (BRLP), respectively the owner of the Tower 560kW, Kleber 1200kW and Alverno 1000kW operating hydropower plants in the Onaway, Michigan area. The Limited Partnerships are parties to long-term Power Purchase Agreements with large local utilities and it is expected to increase Charbone USA’s recurrent revenues for 2023 and beyond for the duration of the PPA’s. The Michigan plants are also generating revenues from the sale of Renewable Energy Certificates. Charbone’s strategy is to acquire its own


hydropower plants, modernize and optimize them to increase their production capacity and, consequently, the value of the assets for Charbone and our shareholders, and to further assist Charbone with its deployment of a green hydrogen regional hub in Michigan and other locations. Charbone plans to develop and construct modular and scalable green hydrogen production facilities in both Wisconsin and Michigan within the next few years. All plants provide land space to accommodate green hydrogen facilities or increase capacities by the automation and modernization of the facilities with newer hydro turbines and other technologies that would allow Charbone USA to produce power at one end and then to transmit its own power via utilities’ power lines, subject to a transmission fee, to a hydrogen production facility in a large industrial or urban center close to end users of such hydrogen. The Northwoods management and operation


teams have agreed to continue to perform their duties under Charbone’s ownership and will work and assist Charbone’s engineering team to implement optimisation, modernization, and automation projects at each of the plants. “This acquisition consolidates Charbone’s strategy into the Midwest. These hydropower plants are well located to produce green hydrogen and deliver it to Detroit, the heart of automotive construction in North America, which is adopting more and more hydrogen technologies,” said Dave B. Gagnon, Chairman and CEO of Charbone. “Charbone’s strategy to produce its green hydrogen from modular and scalable facilities has been allowing us to discuss directly with local utilities and governments about distributed generation interconnection, rather than increasing costs for interconnection on transmission or distribution networks and adding costs to local utilities and customers”. In Canada, Hydro Ottawa Holding Inc announced in December that through its subsidiary Portage Power, it has acquired two additional hydroelectric generating stations from TransAlta Renewables located on the Mississippi River in the Town of Appleton and Galetta Falls. Portage Power is the largest municipally-owned


producer of green power in the province of Ontario. Including the addition of these two generating stations, the company will now own and operate 18 run-of-the-river hydroelectric generation plants in


Ontario, Quebec and New York in addition to the 16 solar installations it has across the city of Ottawa. The Appleton Generating Station is located on the Mississippi River, in the town of Appleton, Ontario. The plant was built in 1994 on the site of an old mill and consists of a powerhouse building, intake channel and control dam. The Galetta station is located near Almonte, Ontario on the Mississippi River where it connects with the Ottawa River. Originally built in 1907, the plant consists of a control dam, intake canal, powerhouse and tailrace channel.


Both new facilities are EcoLogoM certified by the


Environmental Choice Program. Together these facilities generate an average of 12.5GWh annually, increasing Portage Power’s total green generation capacity from 128 to 131MW. ●


Performance and cost reviews


As a recent review from the University of Maine in the US has highlighted, small hydropower projects have the potential to contribute more to a renewable energy future because they can be reliable, flexible and cost-effective. Small hydropower projects are defined by the US Department of Energy as any that produce less than 60MW, though the exact classification of subclasses within the “small” range can be debatable. University of Maine researchers Sharon Klein, Associate Professor at the School of Economics, and Emma Fox, Klein’s former graduate student, categorised the cost and performance metrics used to evaluate the different types of small hydropower projects, comparing the results of these metrics across 13 different studies of projects conducted in multiple countries across four continents. “This literature review was an important first step in the research we conducted


for the National Science Foundation-funded Future of Dams project. We were creating a benefit-cost model of small hydropower in New England and wanted to know what results other researchers had found. It turned out, no one had yet published a full review of the metrics we were seeking to calculate, and it was a lot of work to harmonise data from multiple studies to be comparable,” Klein says. Klein and Fox pinpointed four major types of small hydropower design -


reservoir-based dams, run-of-river, pumped storage, and in-stream turbines. Each style has its advantages and disadvantages. Some styles of small


hydropower projects, like the run-of-river and in-stream turbines, can be less disturbing to habitats and fish passage, but more conventional styles like reservoir-based dams are generally more reliable. “There are so many different styles of small-scale hydropower dam and so little consistency in the literature on benefit-cost assessment for these generating assets,” Fox said. “It was difficult to find points of comparison.” Still, the data showed promising general trends in small hydropower projects,


like decreasing costs of energy and increasing benefits-cost ratio with increasing power capacity. However, the researchers also found a lack of consistency in the reported detail, assumptions, definitions and data inputs across the studies that makes it difficult to effectively compare them. The researchers conclude that although small hydropower projects may still contribute to the renewable energy marketplace, scientists will need more publicly available, user-friendly cost estimation tools with site-specific input data in order to effectively implement them. “Because small hydropower impacts are so site-specific, our study really highlights a need for more investigations of small hydropower costs and benefits — not only financial, but also cultural and ecological — in more locations that use consistent and comparable metrics, assumptions, and inputs,” Klein says. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation Research


Infrastructure Improvement, US Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the US Geological Survey. The study, A Review of Small Hydropower Performance and Cost, was published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews in November 2022.


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