Generating Hydro Kinetic Power in Cold Climates

As society strives to meet its energy needs while maintaining environmental responsibility, the current political movement is to harvest energy from renewable resources. Ambient energy that flows throughout nature is locally available and readily accessible. It can be divided into solar, wind, and hydro. Hydro power is a clean, consistent, and renewable source of free energy that is widely accessible around the world and is particularly in abundance in Canada. Current infrastructure delivers gigawatts of hydro power utilizing dams that tap into this resource by extracting the water's potential energy. There exists tremendous potential for extracting the water's kinetic energy as well; however this is currently not common practice. The viability of hydro kinetic power generation is a question that has lead to many innovations and few demonstrations to prove its economic value to society. The research presented in this book demonstrates the development of this technology, its viability in cold climates, and overall performance. The result clearly shows the potential for this technology to extract gigawatts of free energy.