In-pipe energy: The hydro power nobody is talking about
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 พ.ค. 2024
- Around 4% of global electricity is used for providing tap water. That number is only going to increase and its carbon emissions rival that of aviation. But a surprisingly simple idea can make our water supply more sustainable: In-pipe energy.
Credits:
Reporter: Serdar Vardar
Camera: Killian Bayer
Video Editor: David Jacobi
Supervising Editor: Joanna Gottschalk, Michael Trobridge, Kiyo Dörrer
Special thanks to: Scott DeNeale
We're destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn't need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world - and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we'll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.
#PlanetA, #MicroHydroPower #InPipeEnergy
Read more:
"Pumped Storage and Potential Hydropower from Conduits" by U.S. Department of Energy:
www.google.com/url?sa=t&sourc...
On U.S. conduit hydropower capacity potential by Oak Ridge National Library:
www.ornl.gov/news/existing-wa... /Full report: info.ornl.gov/sites/publicati...
"In-Conduit Hydropower Project" by ALDEN:
www.mass.gov/doc/in-conduit-h...
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:05 Energy intensive tap water
3:27 Harvesting the excess pressure
4:22 How much energy can we get?
7:22 Potential in the Global South
8:40 Outro
How could you make a use of in-pipe turbines?
The most efficient energy use is the one that it is avoided. What about using frequency regulated pumps that deliver the required pressure just at the required moment? That is how factories do it.
On a personal level: you can't, really
In order to work, you'd have to have water constantly flowing. How often do you just let your taps run? You could have these on every tap in your house and still not get enough power to charge your phone.
This is NOT the smartest of DW Planet A videos ! The in-pipe turbines will just steal energy from the pressure-pumps ... Dont ya' get it?
wow.
I just would not.
this whole topic is stupid.
Don’t have them and use less pressure.
Each and every conversion process loses some energy. The most efficient way to gain that energy is not to put it in the first place.
By using in pipe turbines, which get their energy from the pressure in the pipe which is put into the pipe by an electric pump. You have essentially made that water pipe a power transmission line. With a conversion at the beginning, and at the end.
Highly inefficient
I'm stuck on the issue that if the flow is tapped, it will require more pressure to maintain the original flow rate. It seems apparent that there must be a lot of wasted energy generating the water pressure to make this viable. Tapping anything other than that will reduce system performance.
Maybe it's less expensive to tap the wasted energy as done here rather than make the pressure generation system more efficient? I'd imagine it would have to be, or this would not be becoming so popular.
I agree, I don't get it either at first. But I think that they have to ensure that there's enough pressure for everybody and it changes during the day, month, years... So there is a system called "pressure valves" that prevent canalisations to explodes when too much pressure if almost nobody use tap water thus wasting energy. So this system of turbine will be just behind "pressure valves" and so wasting less potential energy.
Am I kinda right or nah ? 😅
You've missed the critical segment around 2:30 discussing the use of pressure valves where currently energy is being dissipated to reduce the water pressure near the end-user, because the end-users pipes can't handle the high pressure (but the high pressure prior to the pressure valve is still required overall to get the water transported over the distance from a centralized water treatment system to all the end-users).
@@hugohenrard7391 I think you're right: these turbines are supposed to replace the pressure valves. When the end-user is not using any water there would be a danger that his tubes inherit the excessive pressure from the central system (if a normal turbine were to be used), so the non-trivial part seems to be to have a kind of arrest-system on this turbine to block the flow in time when the end-user is shutting his taps.
@@hugohenrard7391 I agree. It would HAVE to be upstream from the pressure regulation.
I'm a student and technician in renewable energy, and a similar idea had already occurred to me, I researched it and went to calculate it on paper (on a different scale than the video). Among the results, I came to the conclusion that a high pressure generates little energy, the yield would be low, and would demand more energy in the pressure pump that sends the water. For few people to generate energy to charge their cell phone at the beginning of the distribution line is feasible, but scaling it is complicated. There are several factors that influence performance, the water flow has to be very large for generation if relevant (among others), that's why hydroelectrics are good, but when water is pumped by electricity and you put an electric generator at the end, the gain is low, if it were so simple there would be infinite generators, but the laws of physics do not allow it. In my calculations, for example, approximately 5000 liters at an average height of 5 meters, would be able to generate the equivalent of 15 minutes of energy that a gasoline generator can, and with a submerged pump and that same generator it took me 1 hour and a half to fill that container. Notice how low the gain is. I love the videos on this channel, I loved the space for reflection on this, because I also thought, researched and calculated about this idea, on a different scale from the way it was presented. The idea does not seem to me to be efficient. However, this does not mean that the idea is not good, we should think more and develop ways to make ideas like this workable.
"and would demand more energy in the pressure pump that sends the water"
That was my first thought too, but if the overhead is low to keep the pressure and the flow of water is high we might be able to recover some energy.
As you mentioned, it seems unlikely to be much or spread out so much in small amounts to make sense.
8:31 if this is the size, I guess you can recover a bunch in one place.
My guess is: the water they have in that city probably comes from a high place or something.
Edit: just a quick look up of the city name: "Situated around a high plateau by the banks of the Tigris river"
My intuition says that in stead of 'recouping' some of this energy at the pressure valves it ought to be more economical and common sense to cut back on the part of the water grid that is at high pressure. To keep the flow strong and smooth enough, we'll need to compensate by putting tubes of larger diameter in the central grid and more water towers scattered around the landscape. These adjustments have a material cost, but with the larger tube diameter I think there comes a scale-advantage (and most of the cost comes from the installation process anyway, where the cost is proportional to the length of the tube and not its surface area).
Here consider economics where power produced are sold higher than the cost of pumping power sourced from another supplier.
Plenamente de acordo. Também já tinha pensado nessa questão.
@@5th_decile Agree. A more optimized delivery system and real-time adjusted pressure, rather than our current system of overcompensating (if I am interpreting the video correctly) and then dissipating the pressure in the form of wasted energy/heat.
My city, near Denver, receives its water from high in the Rocky Mountains and all water is moved by gravity. Pressure in the large raw water pipes is dissipated at treatment plants by hydroelectric turbines, which earn about 2 million USD per year sold at wholesale prices to the regional power provider-- so the concept is proven. However pressure in the treated water pipelines is dissipated with small turbines and those barely pay for installation costs and maintenance. I can not imagine tiny turbines in the pipes of my home would be worth the effort.
Also you have completely disregarded the challenges that would come with this energy. Water pipes don't always work, there will be problems like.
1. Decreasing water table leading to lesser supply of water and lower pressure.
2. We don't have only one season on earth. In winters the pipes get blocked, they even burst due to ice accumulation when temperature goes below 0°C.
3. Rusting is another factor where pipes get rusted, or accumulate minerals, same could be the issue with turbines you are talking about, which would hinder their efficiency greatly.
4. Cost effectiveness, it would simply not generate enough electricity for the buck spent keeping the above challenges in mind.
This was miy first take away from the video in first 5 minutes.
I believe these guys should find another career.
Exactly, it's only feasible to have them on the pipes if the pressure comes from gravity only. If you put an alternator on an electric cars motor it won't make more (not even the same) amount of energy than it already takes to spin the motor and this applies to the water systems where water is pressurized by pumps as well.
The crux of this green grift is to target municipalities, not households. The video uses the tiny turbine on the garden hose to trick viewers into thinking they will be able to get free energy to use within the household, but actually they want to trick voters into supporting legislation that forces municipal water agencies to adopt their product despite the fact that they can't prove that the product will result in a net gain.
I submitted this concept to Popular Mechanics in the 1990s and all I got was a T-shirt.
Should have told an engineer
This video has multiple issues in my opinion. We need to talk about the amount of energy that can be harvested from pipes.
For all cities that need pumps to distribute water, you cannot harvest more energy than the pumps have put in - otherwise you would create a perpetuum mobile. Sure, we can harvest some of the excess energy during reduction of pressure. But when you say we can power a city from the pressure in its water pipes, that is just wrong, as we can never harvest more than the roughly 4% of total energy consumption that we put into the water system, as you claim.
For a typical household that we can assume uses 500 liters of water a day (some 180 m³ per year), and "wastes" 3 bar of water pressure, which are rather high assumptions to me, that means a potential energy of 500 kg * 30 m * g = 150 kJ per day. That is 41 Wh per day. Yes, you can charge a few phones with that, but that's not even 1% of a typical households energy consumption.
Regarding the second report at 4:55, you got the units wrong. The report is much less optimistic than the one before. The report says we can harvest an energy of 43 GWh/a (Gigawatt hours per year), not a continuous power of 43 Gigawatt. Converting to power, this is only 5 MW (Megawatt) of continuous power. Enough to power 5000 households, but not 43 million of them.
So sure, build some turbines in places where pressure regulation valves reduce pressure strongly. But this is not the solution for making lots of clean energy.
So im coming back at you just throwing this back in to you you know water and tidal power is unstoppable so learn we find different ways to harness don't just give up that is constant energy without fossils
@@johndoolan9732 We have to separate hydro-electric and tidal power from harvesting energy back from the potable water distribution system. Hydro power works well of course, but is limited to areas where there is enough precipitation and there are hills nearby. In the most effective locations, large dams were already built. Exploiting tidal power would be great, but we still have to make it work more reliably at large scales as far as I know.
Turbines in the water pipes would act like pumped storage hydro power at best. The supply is very limited, since we need to build water towers to decouple the energy used by pumps and the generation from turbines. (A water tower is in fact a battery already, since the pumps can run when electricity is readily available and not when water usage is high.) Also, the power from the turbines is not constant: Considering a residential area, at night, when not much water is used, there is no flow to generate energy from. In the morning, when people shower and water usage peaks, there is also little energy to be harvested since the pressure difference across a regulation valve will not be that high - if it is, the water system could be built more efficiently in the first place. So unless you're going to waste potable water in order to generate a bit of electricity, the power output depends on the time of day, and not in a way that it would balance solar (i.e. it will also not generate a large amount of power at night).
Don't get me wrong, though. There are ways to get lots of clean energy, and the technology is readily available: Wind and solar energy. Combined with storage, may it be batteries, pumped hydro or hydrogen, which we can all use for different time scales of storage, we have all the tools we need. We should not wait for a great invention to start with an energy transition. And this video sounds a bit like this is such an invention - that is my main issue here.
Yeah, I kept waiting for the video to explain *why* anyone should do this while it's showing an ebay 'free energy' device as an example and talking about how much energy it already takes to move water. So I looked up Portland example and it's a turbine in a gravity-fed pipeline. It's just conventional hydropower retrofitted onto existing infrastructure.
@@hungryhippo6259 That's exactly what is needed. Here in California, we have in-conduit hydropower for years. If you read the CEC document, a site assessment is needed and suitable sites must contain elevation drops. This video is terrible - the presenter doesn't know the science.
@Johannes Weis Thanks for your comment! Please, let us clarify a few things.
Our reporter never says that this would be a solution to power 43 million homes, but rather 1 million. This figure comes from the Oak Ridge National laboratory research. They say, “ORNL estimates that conduit hydropower, which uses water from structures such as water supply pipelines and irrigation canals, has the potential to add 1.41 gigawatts of electricity to the country’s power grid - enough to power more than a million homes." Link: www.ornl.gov/news/existing-water-infrastructure-may-hold-key-generating-more-hydropower
There seems to be a miscommunication on the “4% total energy.” The IEA found that the world uses 4% of the world’s total global electricity consumption goes to powering the water sector. Link: www.iea.org/reports/water-energy-nexus. We did not suggest that this technology would be able to power more than 4% of the world’s total energy consumption, of course.
The video is not suggesting mini hydro can overtake wind or solar or even classic hydropower. Nor is it about turbines in household pipes. It's for ANY type of water supply or disposal system. None of the turbines in themselves produce a large amount of electricity, but the tech is vastly scalable and so there can be thousands of them in cities that add up to a sizeable amount of otherwise wasted energy.
Rather than complicating the infrastructure further, isn't the solution to manage the pressures more effectively so you use less energy? It strikes me as a solution for a problem that shouldn't exist. Sure if you've got a high head source, extract the energy, but if you have pressure reducers working overtime, reduce the power input at the pumping source, far more efficient. Ok, Water utilities need to invest in decent telemetry to monitor pressure and flow rates but the benefits in energy saving and the ability to spot leakage issues and reduce waste would be every bit as useful.
I'm no hydrological engineer, but having too much pressure in a water system seems fine... having too little pressure is a crisis because people turn on the tap and no longer get water. I suspect it's basically impossible to match use 1:1 without encountering the latter. It's already a sometimes tricky balance to do that with energy grids that respond instantaneously, let alone with a system that requires physical movement of water that you can't make move faster.
Also, if I'm not mistaken, there's sanitation concerns in not keeping the system pressurized.
@@tHebUm18 You are right, mostly. Technology can help us manage the pumps and as said, telemetry will make sure all parts has a safe pressure.
One guy I know has a pool with a pump. It was a standard pump installed as the manufacturer described. But it took a lot of energy and made too much noise. He installed a speed regulator on the motor and cut the electricity bill to just 15 % and the noise went down a lot. The flow was almost the same and enough for his pool. That's how you do adaptive management of water pressure.
The thing here is that conventional pressure regulators don't waste energy, rather they conserve energy. The basic premise of this invention is wrong
@@michaelharrison1093 but would that conservation then only be temporary? When the state of the system changes it will undoubtedly release that potential. The premise of the technology applies to the inevitable change of states.
Ignoring the fact that you're only planning for overflow and not underflow, which can mean everyone turns on the tap at the same time and a trickle comes out... The high water pressure used in pipes has 2 crucial reasons for existing. The first one is that pipes rupture from damage or catastrophic failure all the time, if the flow rate was low then 1 or 2 ruptures might be enough to completely shut down the entire water grid. This is such a serious problem too as it's already known that most cities have pipes broken *somewhere* and because they have no idea where it could actually be all they can do is make the water pressure higher. Second reason is to prevent as much bacterial growth as possible, stagnant water allows bacteria to flourish. This happened to Flint Michigan where the water became stagnant in the pipes and toxic metals were leeched out of the pipes by acids the bacteria were producing.
I think it's just easy for us to forget how much water demand can fluctuate too. One day water usage might be low, because it's raining and people are tired and then the next day the sun is out bright with people filling up pools and running water sprinkler systems on the grass.
*Help me get this straight. You use energy to run a pump to pressurize water to distribute it to other places with sufficient pressure to achieve a useable flow rate. Then you stick a turbine in the pipe to steal some of the power you paid for to pressurize it in the first place. By doing so, you've reduced the dynamic pressure in the pipe whenever the water needs to be going somewhere. Consequently, you end up with a lower flow rate and less water travelling through the pipe.*
*Nature has a very strict rule that says you can't get something for nothing, which appears to be what you think you can do. In fact, due to inefficiencies introduced into any system that converts energy from one form to another, you will recover less energy than what you would have saved if you had simply lowered the pressure of the pump... assuming that lower pressure was still adequate for your needs. If it's not still adequate, your turbine in the pipe would not leave you with adequate pressure either.*
*The **_only_** way this would ever make sense is if you were fortunate enough to have a gravity fed water supply with no pumps. Then you'd have a simplified hydroelectric system that operates just like a dam does.*
*There is still one way to make this work a little bit, which you've found out. You can attach a small turbine on the end of your garden hose and harvest a modest amount of energy while the water flows out on the ground or down the drain, but it only works when the water is running. What will you do with all that extra water, other than waste it and pay for it?*
Hey there! The video is specifically talking about the making use of the energy that's currently wasted at pressure-release valves. Check the section around 2:36 where we explain it in more detail. 💧
@@DWPlanetA But under normal conditions, how often would water be flowing out of pressure relief valves? Wouldn't you have a regulator to keep the line pressure at the optimal levels? Once water runs out of a relief valve and spins a turbine, where does it go, lacking sufficient pressure to do much other than run downhill? You're essentially harvesting an excess of energy being otherwise wasted elsewhere.
there is no water wasted at pressure-release valves. This fact is simply wrong. A pressure reducing valve would remain closed for most of the time. It will only open when there is a demand happens at downstream. Are you wasting energy when you are standing on the ground? Should you put on a spring boots or something to generate energy when you are standing ? Static energy is not wasted. Go find an engineer to do fact check before you post this false and misleading info. @@DWPlanetA
Almost ten years ago I wrote a paper on energy generation with microturbines in certain sewage systems. The thing with drinking water is that the sanitary conditions needed make it harder, but with sewage or irrigation systems regulation is lighter and implementation becomes easeir
How it's harder to generate electricity with drinking water than sewage?
@Harish Babu M because (at leat here)the regulations for clean water are too strict. There's a lot of red tape before adding anything to the system or before any repairs, modifications....
Sewage using gravity I can see. Using a pressure bed water source is just a transfer of energy and actually stealing energy from the sources providing that water pressure.
I recently got my PhD on the subject... I proposed a dimensionaless method to design in pipe turbines: " In-pipe axial pico-hydraulic tailored turbine design: A novel approach using a dimensionless design chart"
@@samuxan but wouldn't sevage water contain impurities like hair, fibres and other nasty stuff? How would you get rid of that without blocking the sevage line? Because you must if you don't want to damage your Turbine machine, things like hair or fibers are bad for Turbines unless it's a very big turbine.
Thank you, it seems that this type of energy production is ideal for areas that water moves in the pipes freely because of a gradient, for example from high hills to low hills. Extracting energy from water that is pushed in the pipes by a pump is waste of energy.
...or rather a recovery of energy that would otherwise be wasted in a pressure valve.
Not even in that case. The negative pressure of the water flowing downhill will compensate that required to push it uphill. The net pressure will be small and require little energy in the first place.
@@andreasvogel5186 This doesn't make sense. Pressure regulators are not exceptional energy wasters. If a certain model is, the energy waste will occur inside it, an external turbine won't help a bit.
@mike42356 In the above clip named in - pipe energy the subject is about producing energy from the city water or drinking water as a " byproduct " of that system . Without any doubt Producing energy from streaming water has its own principles.
@@andreasvogel5186 Name it a Dam
Any mechanical resistant met will cost energy no matter how small. PERIOD. This is indeed, a pipe dream.
That's the point. To turn extra pressure into mechanical energy then electrical potentially.
They mentioned it shortly, those systems would be in place of pressure reducing valves where energy is otherwise just dissipated. You could compare it with regenerative breaking instead of resistive breaking.
@@Kaepsele337it still makes no sense to over-pressurize and then reduce. What they need is more and smarter pumps
Yes, this is exactly how I generate my own electricity.
With an in pipe generator that provides the electricity to pump the water through a pipe in a circular layout.
That then in turn drives the in pipe generator in the circular pipe layout to make even more electricity.
I just have to be careful to avoid runaway energy building up in the system or it bursts the pipe.
So I have had to install an over pressure relief valve and a safety trip switch to prevent excess electric current from burning out the pump motor.
Hehe...
:^ )
There's a reason why nobody's talking about it.
youre just jealous as you didnt think of it before that genius gregg semler did :p
im sure he didnt sell it in quite those words, but ya gotta admit... takes balls to do it!
the genius is in playing the game and screwing the system...
it would be the gallows if i had my way.
Pure stupidity as it violates the laws of physics!!! If your idea is so great - why haven't we seen it already commercialized and you making billions from it??!!!
Perpetual motion machines are so much easier than fusion as well. Why are engineers so thick! 😂
This video made feel like we are in idiocracy.
@@WindowsSchmindows
Don't feel bad, we've already tunneled below the idiocracy level!
It's just difficult predicting what to expect as we keep heading down.
A pressure reducing valve (pressure regulator) does not "waste energy" as stated at 2:35. If it did, heat would be generated because the energy must go somewhere. Large water systems have excess capacity to ensure good performance even when there is maximum demand. Adding turbines to a water system will remove energy and cause the pumps to work harder to maintain water pressure and flow rate.
4:30 1.41 jigawatts? That's more than enough to travel back to the future.
Great Scott!
I would have liked a better explanation on how and how much energy we waste when changing the pressure. To me the looks to be two problems. 1 you need to make sure that you are not just adding more resistance in the system so that you increase the energy needed to pump the water. 2. It looks to me that it is not that much energy you can recoup and it might be cheaper to just build solar or wind.
In general I prefer minimizing energy losses over recouping energy, cause you just add one more step where you also lose energy.
Well said!
Then you missed the part about pressure valves.
Pressure valves are there and you can’t do without them or your house’s smaller pipes will break. Energy is wasted in those pressure-reducing valves. Instead of continuing wasting it, it can be passed through a turbine and generate electricity.
@@johnnny777 the issue is how much energy is wasted and can be recovered, the video makes it seem like there is a massive potential like as if we can recover most of this 4% of global energy consumption, which is not the case
@@aaronhamburg4428 also, 4% is not much! Probably about the same amount (if not less) of energy wasted in mining crypto currencies could be recovered using this method! (Also I think this method is worthless and would add more power consumption to the system).
I remember thinking about this in school when we learned about hydroelectric power made by dams. It seems like a logical extension of the technology to me. Installing turbines in areas where the water source is at a high enough elevation, and at the base of water towers are the obvious spots in my opinion. I thought about having small units on people's houses to power a battery backup system, but I think the usage would be to short and intermittent to get a turbine moving.
I'm sure it varies quite a bit by local geography, but in general, the pumps will be working even harder, and building even more pressure. If you want to "tap" into the resource of moving water, the oceans are hardly used. We have a mind-blowing amount of energy mostly untapped by the natural movement of the waves/tides. At the shore/beaches, we have a regular forward and back motion of water that could be made to move huge aluminum plates back and forth on a toothed track, which could be spinning enormous turbine generators. The power and scale of the ebb and flow of all that water could be harnessed to great effect IMO.
Actually back in 2014, when I was in my engineering, in our final year project we talked about this concept but our guide didn't accept our idea ...
Literally he thought we are crazy 🤣😂🤣
Obviously you didn't take a physics course along side it good thing too you would've failed it lol
Energy input > energy output
Because it's stupid and shows how little physics you know... and it's not some complicated post graduate level physics... IT'S 7TH GRADE PHYSICS MAN!
And you call yourself an engineer?
Law of conservation.
Pressure valves are necessary to protect the water pipes from catastrophic failures, so I don't think they could easily be replaced by a turbine. However the delta pressure that is absorbed by the pressure valve is converted in heat. This heat could be reuse to preheat the water boiler of the house/building.
Plumber here who has researched patents for this exact idea. It needs to happen on the drainage side, not the supply side…….and it needs to be set up in conjunction where say a hi rise installs turbines at the base of the stack, that energy is then returned to the building that can be stored in conjunction with solar and hydronic reducing costs for fees and getting a higher leads rating.
i've wanted to do this for years. i'm amazed it isn't a more widely adopted practice. you could also use thermoelectric generation on heating pipes, as well as rain water generators on drain pipes, and if you can accommodate it, you could focus wind through pipes into a small turbine. and this is all at your home. at the point of use. you don't need to dig up the ground for it. though, industrialising it will obviously require digging. but all the aforementioned are affordable solutions which can be done right at home. now we just need to drive down the cost of batteries!
Here's why it isn't a widely adopted practice: It uses more energy than it generates. If it didn't it would be a literal perpetual motion machine. Every bit of energy you take from the water is extra energy you need to put back in to maintain the pressure the system needs. It's a gimmick like solar roadways
So since you propose to fine-tune the entire system by adding turbines instead of valves (assuming I understood the theory right), why not just make the whole system more efficient at delivering the exact pressure required, since it really seems the cheapest solution. Adding turbines instead of valves will surely add maintenance costs on top of longer or shorter periods of time when the turbines are useless. Adding them will likely also motivate to adjust pressure before them (perhaps) just to reduce their uselessness. Better fix the system while this actions is still cheap and less complicated.
The turbines will have valves in series, and would be installed parallel to the existing pressure regulating valves as shown in the video. You're right that designing the system correctly is usually preferred. In this case, durability and dependability is valued more than efficiency. Water department labor is expensive and slow, so KISS. A big part of the design choices is that water systems are only partly designed to wash your dishes and flush your toilet. Most of the design is determined by fire protection standards. At least in the US, wood construction demands large water supplies and expensive infrastructure. Rebuild all our cities in concrete, etc. etc. and we could get by with much less water infrastructure. Instead there are more and more five over one mixed use buildings, packed with plastic contents and with EV's sitting nearby, fire dept's aren't going out of business anytime soon.
I’m a plumber, and that is a great idea. Every house should have one right after the water meter
The energy inside the pipe is to ensure most of the people has enough pressure in their household. Not for energy generation. If you want to save energy, the pump system should be designed intelligent enough not to over pressure the piping system.
Same thing, You shouldn’t put a solar panel under a street light to generate electricity because street light is simply not meant for energy generation.
I love the fact that even dry areas can, at the very minimum, recapture some of the energy used to pressurize and elevate the water.
in that sense its like its own "battery" converting back the energy put in and getting some of it back.
since its "new" my next question is maintainence, hopefully the pipes and generator turbine can keep the same shelf life. when the pipes are old and need to be replaced, so does the engine. or at the very least the turbine can offset the cost of pipe inspections.
check the pipes for corrosion while doing the routine generator inspection. all in all I hope this becomes cheap enough that ALL cities can do this and not just the metropolis ones.
it's not worth it unless the water pressure comes from gravity because pressure inside the pipes is build up by using electricity and recovering some of it will make the initial pumps that make the pressure to work harder. It's like trying to add an alternator to an electric car's motor. It will just work harder to push the car forward and generate electricity but in the end it will not recover as much as it uses extra because there are loses.
They had, back in the days, a device that worked based exactly on this principle. It was called a Dynamo and many houses had one installed on their water main.
2,000,000 Watts is just 2MW. Don't pollute the information by inflationary reporting. 2MW will power the tea kettle of 1,000 homes, nothing more.
And
In rainy season we can use this technology in high rising buildings to produce electricity by fitting this generators in the pipes of buildings to produce electricity.
In tropical area around equator there it rains almost daily, this technology can be more beneficial there.
We can also generate electricity by using waste water running down in high rising buildings.
True! I hadn't thought of that application because I'm in a dry region.
While the concept is promising, large-scale implementation with current hydroelectric technology poses challenges. Extracting significant power at lower water pressures necessitates the development of more efficient turbines and generators.
This makes me think of something I heard on the Volts podcast recently… it’s a startup that builds drop-in turbines for canals. There are tens of thousands of miles of canals transporting water, in just about every major city. They’re not as utterly efficient as a bespoke dam, but they’re MUCH cheaper, because it’s an easily installed, mass produced system.
This reminds me of when regenerative braking came out for the first hybrid cars. It seemed like such an obvious head-slapped moment that we shouldn’t let that excess energy simply go to waste!
Looking forward to hearing about this tech being installed more throughout me region.
It’s more like putting solar panels inside your house because your lights are too bright
It’s more like putting solar panels inside your house because your lights are too bright
It’s more like putting solar panels inside your house because your lights are too bright
Let me boil up the key points out of the video, because I find it "too" optimistic:
- CASE A: water is pumped into the grid -> energy can be recoverd from EXCESS pressure.
Pumping water and turbine it again consumes more energy than no pumping the water in the first place (because of inneficiencies). The question is, how often do we have EXCESS pressure in a grid, where the pressure is generated by controlled pumps?
-CASE B: water is moved through the grid by its own potential energy (it is stored at some altitude above consumers) -> some energy will be needed to move the water through the grid, the rest can be used to generate electricity.
To obtain energy from water in a high reservoir has been done for ages. It is hydroelectric energy. Because of economy of scale, it is more efficient to get the energy centralized at the outlet of the reservoir than decentralized in small pipes. One just needs to leave enough energy available, to move the water through the grid.
That said, the available energy depends strongly on the case. That is surely why different studies report different values. Even the "expert" interviewed in the video says that she cannot give an estimation of the potential of this technology.
My opinion: these videos do more harm than help. Even though I find them inspiring, they transmit the idea that there is plenty of easily accesible energy, which may lead people to think, that we can "just stop oil".
This is fundamentally myopic. If there's enough extra energy in our water supply to generate power... then the supply is being overpowered. You'd get more benefit from simply reducing the input pumping energy. You can't get more energy out than you put in.
This sounds like a corporate plug for small generators (generally inefficient compared to large installations). Otherwise we would focus on reducing inputs and using the energy savings more wisely.
I would like to applaud the fact this channel really makes an effort to pronounce names of all cultures as best as they can.
Your videos are great! One thing though - you consistently use the terms for power and energy incorrectly. When you are talking about power the units are in W, MW, GW, etc. This is used for a the installed capacity of power plants or the amount electricity a lightbulb uses (1 watt = 1 joule per second...the rate at which work is done). Over time, like the course of a year, energy should be used. Energy is the "ability to do work" or how much work has been done...it is measured in kWh, kWh, GWh, TWh, etc... At 5:00 you don't say 43 GW of energy per year could be harvested...it is incorrect. The paper uses energy terms here not power.
Thanks man.
We run a small community water district here in Oregon (around 12 homes) and the system exists over a 300+ ft drop. We've long had problems with excess pressure in the downhill portions of the system and have discussed the need to install more PRVs. I sent a link to this doc and hope to get a conversation going and shop around for system. The chlorinator currently runs on solar and, being in the forest, it rarely delivers enough to meet demand and the batteries have to be swapped out and charged regularly. Having any meaningful supplementation could help that.
You can just back feed a centrifugal pump. They have good efficiency when used as turbines, This guy is just all hype and bullshit, he didn't come up with anything new
I had thought of this 20 years ago. I'm thrilled that it's finally being implemented.
This is a great solution for the right location where there is excess pressure. Wether it’s cost effective or not is a whole other conversation.
What about the sewage waters that fall in pipes inside the tallest buildings?
Will you go to do regular maintenance on a turbine stinking of shit?
I had this idea a few years ago. The problem arises when everyone tries to use a turbine on their water pipe. The pumping station has to pump harder and harder to maintain sufficient pressure on the pipe. So you still have to put in extra energy. I like the idea of the turbine running when the pressure is too high and it has merit a a concept, I would like to see some figures on actual estimations of energy saved and electricity generated. Great video,!!
Hey there! Mini hydro technology only collects pressure valve waste energy already being generated by our water transportation service. Therefore, no additional pressure is needed and it would not affect the system. The process is explained at 2:26.
@@DWPlanetAlearn some basic physics from engineers first before spreading such nonsense
2:42 Not a pressure valve , just regular valve
Also there is this thing called second law of thermodynamics , which basically tells you that most of realworld enery processes are not reversible , therefore you are justgoing to end up wasting more electrical enery with this system . If you wish to consereve energy in regards to water distribution , just use water towers.
What an idea, developing countries can actually tap into this technology and meet their electricity needs with less efforts while providing water to their populations.
I have been wondering about this for years. Also, what about the heat energy flowing though drain pipes ?
I thought about this too with water tanks.. So many homes here supply their own water.. After pumping up water to a tank, gravity does most of the pumping back down.
Now, the application is, since we already have tanks over 20ft tall, and some even double or more height, there can be a valve/turbine area that would charge up a battery both during use and when not in use.. So low pressure/rpm when not in use, and higher when in use.. Offcourse more research has to be done, but I believe there's potential for powering little things like lights, fans, cellphones, etc.. I'm sure a lot of homes here will be super happy to be able to do that in conjunction with solar power, the grid will only serve for heavy tasks like pumping water back up, which is normal already, heating, cooling, etc.
As a water researcher and enginer, I see that there's little we can do to make this technology worthwhile and sustainable. Using electricity to increase the water pressure mechanically is a very low performance process to begin with. OK, let's assume the pressure is builtup due to elevation increase (e.g. water towers). To harness the energy you need to get your water running. That meanse while we're asked to reduce our water consumption to preserve water resources, the energy gain would be not constant and less than what you can count on. This idea is useful when is employed in long range and massive pipeline projects, when the recipient is in a lower altitude and certain technical requirements are met. In those projects the flow of the water is reliably constant and the amount of the nergy that would normally damped in the hydraulic ponds or pressure reducing valves would be recovered (partially).
Isn't it better to alter system to get rid off excessive pressure?
It would be extremely difficult to implement in full. A pressure relief valve can protect the water system by releasing excess pressure when it exceeds a predetermined limit. But if there is some excess pressure anyway, these in-pipe turbines can take advantage of it!
putting turbines will make the water plants waste more energy to pump due to the turbines someone did not think hard enough
there are some great practical videos on youtube about small/mini/micro power generation, a step up from the in-hose example you demonstrate. people harnessing power from the drainage ditches on their property or in their community. agree that where we're currently throwing energy away on pressure reduction, we could easily update the design of components to harness that wasted energy. any little bit to reduce an energy bill for a household helps, even if it's just powering led lights and charging batteries
For a pump fed water supply there is no such thing as free energy. The utility has already paid for the energy to run its pumps. If you try to extract energy from the pressurized water then you will just be reducing the flow rate due to the loss of pressure caused by the turbine generator. This means lower pressure at the tap or the utility will need to increase the water pressure which means more energy used by their pumps. This is a game that cannot be won. Gravity fed water systems may yield some energy harvesting but not if everyone does it.
it is amazing the amount of energy people will expend to try to get something for free.
I am a big fan of harvesting energy from places where we're already wasting it. This is an example if aunt even aware was tappable. Thank you for such an informative video. Another energy source we ignore is excess heat. District heating/cooling networks could let us dump excess heat into sand batteries and vice versa.
The energy isn't being wasted it is using it to pressure the pipes, by doing this you are taking the energy and it would have to be put back in at the other end in other words it would be no different from me illegally tapping into your power supply and saying hey look how clever I am, I am getting free electricity
Very interesting video! I have been thinking for some time now if I could use my water tanks on top of a 5-story condominium building I own to generate power. When waste water is going down, new water has to be pumped up from an underground tank to refill the tanks on the roof. There must be a way to use the pressure of the waste water going down to at least lower the energy consumption of the pumps pushing water back up again...
@@joelc9439 or both... and a wind turbine :)
Increadible work given the limitations on budget and time. Truly amazing
This reminds me of when People suggest hooking up extra alternators to a Vehicle in order to generate free electricity. If the Water is being pumped then you're introducing more friction/resistance and inevitably the entire system will consume more electricity than it creates if it's piped/under pressure. This would be viable in a non-pressurized stream or water-way though and we already do this with our reservoirs, which are really just giant batteries.
The idea is phenomanal, the logistics are formidable. I love it
Its nice to see something that i considered 10 years ago as a passing thought come about for real, would be interesting to know how much energy a family using their water at home could generate, unfortunately I considered it to be not worth it shame I didn't see the bigger picture :(
You were entirely correct. it would only work when water was being drawn. ie for a few minutes each day.
@@harry130747 and the energy you generate is an added cost to the water provider as there pumps have to work harder unless the water comes from a high altitude storage and water is not pumped into the pipes by an electric pump.
i have heard of this concept before i also understand that sometimes there is wasted pump energy in the pipes that could been harvested to make the system more efficient also
Where ever there is a downward flow of water where the load can be taken off the pumping system, a water-wheel
generator can be installed. It doesn't have to be monumental.. just a few small ones to help power things like car charging stations.
It would be great to replace pressure regulators in households with turbines + battery chargers to support photovoltaic systems. A pressure sensor could control the battery charging via pulse-width modulation to provide constant water-pressure in a household and convert the pressure difference into electricity.
Intersting idea for sure. Wonder how would this compare to just using variable drives on the pumps so they dont use extra pressure on the water
In simple summary, if the area's water system use pressure valve, then that system can be use to generate electricity.
Some area might dont have enough pressure to supply water
I’ve been trying to find the right devices to use this especially living on a creek.
As opposed to Solar micro Hydro electric runs all the time, and the cost of a 2 kW generator is less than 500 W of solar panels. Proper set ups usually have to consider what to do with excess power generation, usually using an extra water heater as a battery of sorts
If you have a rain barrel, you can even utilize the force of gravity or in the downspouts of your gutters. I need to do is make sure there is a valve so it’s either flowing or not flowing at all. These ways you can make self-sustaining systems for crawlspace, dilation, attic, ventilation, solar, lights, cell, phone, chargers…
There’s definitely potential here. Imagine a water tower with a tank above and below ground. You could pump water up to the top tank when electricity is cheap and let it flow through a turbine to the bottom tank when it’s more expensive while still providing pressurized drinking water.
Way too inefficient in terms of the energy conversion. What you are suggesting is a pumped-storage hydroelectricity system, which exists much only in very limited circumstances. It is simply much more energy efficient to use a battery farm rather than such system. Not to mention you need a huge area for the system to work because water takes up a lot of space for not that much energy generated.
Yes. Make it a pair of dams in the mountains. A quick google says that 100m is considered 'high head'. I suppose a flat landscape could support a 100m head system if a huge dam were constructed but that would be expensive. I think mountain ranges are necessary to do it cheaply.
This actually exists already, it's a form of energy storage used to balance the power grid, just on a bigger scale.
The way it works is you have two lakes, one on a higher elevation and one below. When there is no much demand for electricity the excess energy is used to pump water up then in peak time when there is not enough energy produced the water flows to the bottom lake and turns turbines.
@Aaron Hamburg We have a video on alternative batteries, which you might be interested in: th-cam.com/video/-vobMl5ldOs/w-d-xo.html - check it out and let us know what you think in the comments 🙃
@@aaronhamburg4428 - that’s true. There aren’t many of these lakes though due to some very finicky requirements to make it work. Length of pipe, elevation, etc… all have to be properly aligned. I figure the water towers wouldn’t generate as much power, but it would be fairly easy to build multiples.
This is not just a pipe dream 😂
Calculations on flow and pressure in systems are a fine balancing act. There might be a hand full of older system to tap that will be beneficial, but the balance of newer systems will not function properly once you remove energy from them. You will reduce flow speeds in pipes leading to reservoirs not filling in time, air locks in systems and other unwanted results. Remember that energy cannot be made and whatever you removed will have to be replaced( and then some due to mechanical losses). So if people tap energy from a water system you will have to add more than people are tapping.. This will cause a circular problem that will exponentially increase energy requirements to pump water.
I'm working as a stationary power engineer connected to two skyscrapers and we have multiple high pressure pumps for domestic water and closed loops systems and coincidentally, the EV charging stations are on the same floor right outside our station and the wiring is passing through. All I need now is a plan and some superiors convincing ;)
This is part of the solar punk future I want to be a part of.
Seems like a neat way to generate a bit of energy on a system that's needed regardless. Efficiency!
I had envisioned a sort of water generator using the same principle. Like an hour glass with water. Two vessels one with water one empty with a small turbine generator in between. As the filled vessel is elevated it would flow into the empty one. Free energy with a little input from the user.
About six months ago a friend bought a condo in an older converted apartment building where they cheaped out on installing meters for each unit, so he basically pays an extra fixed amount in his quarterly HOA and condo fees and can use as much cold water as he likes.
So I started brainstorming ideas for how he could take advantage of this, mostly as an exercise of creativity and not really intending to actually do anything with the ideas. But one of my ideas was to install some kind of an induction motor inline to the main line right by the shutoff valve. Then I started wondering how much that would cost in water pressure. I figured there would be more resistance, especially if the generator is directly connected to a very high load of some sort.
I never thought of (or knew about, really) pressure relief valves as a good place to tap into that energy without interfering with the distribution overall.
I wonder if refactoring the relief valves to use a dynamo instead of whatever method they currently use could also improve these valves by allowing finer and more dynamic control over how much pressure each valve can remove from the system. I would assume putting a larger load on the dynamo would put more pressure on the valve, restricting even more flow beyond it.
Depending on how much your friend pays for energy what he could do is start to mine cryptocurrency, because if he is not paying the true cost of electricity, it might be profitable. I’d recommend miners and not GPUs.
Thank you DW for another well made piece!
The water grid is basically wasting energy by imparting more pressure than is needed for some of the households. In hilly areas, every house is at a different height, so the water pressure in any district needs to be high enough to supply the highest house in that district. So all the houses at lower height get water with excess pressure and that's where in-pipe generation can recapture some of the energy. But there will always be a penalty on the flow rate. This could be solved by generating electricity from the pressure while slowly releasing the water into a local tank at zero pressure, from which the water can be intermittently accessed at any desired flow rate in high volumes.
I have a 600 W pump to drain a pool and the water jet it is able to generate is much weaker than the tap water. This indicates that the utility is using around 1 kW on the end-of-pipe losses in my house.
Water utilities in Denmark always employ several parallel, speed-controlled pumps to maintain pressure with minimum need of throttling.
Or we could design our water systems to be with nearly zero excess pressure when it reaches the houses, and each home owner has their own water pressurizer - like you have your own pressure washer.
This is brilliant!
Best thing is to reduce our water use drastically. Most effective would be changing toward a plant based diet as animal agriculture uses the vast amount of water.
❤
It’s quite smart. We already send the water, if all you did was keep the pressure maintained so everyone can run power creating devices as the water flows out being used.
As the report states this isn't a silver bullet and it would only make sense to install these at points where regular pressure release valves were/are needed anyway. Otherwise it will reduce the flow intensity and negatively impact ones water pressure.
Please learn how to pronounce your metric prefixes. It is Gigawatt like "gig" and not Gigawatt like "jig."
.... rubbish dream...
Why?
Without people who had those types of "rubbish dreams", you would be enjoying the comforts of the Stone Age today.
Ottawa, Canada has installed turbines at the output of some of their reservoirs. The pumps are working slowly and steadily to fill the reservoir from the rivers. Some of that energy is reclaimed when the water flows out through the pipes to the taps.
many errors
1. @ 4.33 USA study reported 1.4 GW, what that does not mention is the labour and cost for installing millions of hydro turbines, synchonisers, control panels, piping, valves, strainers, and operating costs for lots of tiny generators.
2. Also nobody mentions that the water flow is not constant, the flow in pipes varies from zero to full flow due to demand, think about how much water is used in a home at night, practically zero, so irrespective of the "pressure" the flow rate will be zero.
nobody
Just genius, hope this reaches Tanzania 🇹🇿
yeah, sure you can use that, but you will also loose in velocity of that water, which might become a problem, or at the worst end, just require additional pump/pumps down the road.
We have this in Braunschweig, Germany. The power is generated by the height difference between the source and the city. The power is then used to run the purifing, filtering and pumps used to get the water preasure in other places
yeah, totally different than the intended application. Using a natural height difference makes sense. Using the pressure differential created by a pump is nuts. The pump has to put in more work than one can harvest with these silly turbines.
What bout 3rd Newton law here? The more energy produced in these pipe generators , the more energy you need to apply at the start of the pipe. So if there's any place to set pipe generator, we should first start questioning water providers how they can optimize pressure at a certain line.
I thought of this solution when i was 14, i went to my science and math teacher. And they explained to me that it would never work. We still did some tests and calculations because i was stubborn and didn't believe them without prove. I called and talked to people of the industry and they told me that they also had thought of it but the math didn't worked out.
I still believe that we missed out some important nuances in our math and tests. And that it will influence the outcome in favor of this idea.
But not by any means as much as it is claimed in the video.
@screamingbirdheart No single turbine would produce much electricity. However, considering this is possible for ANY water source, collectively, the amount could be meaningful, according to researchers.
The point people are missing or at least not discussing much is that Tesla is doing this (also) to increase the proposition of EVs for the general public. The more adoption of EVs the more cars Tesla will sell. Right now the competition is still ICE so this is a smart move.
I don’t know about other countries but here, in NZ, it’s illegal to use domestic supply to run a turbine. It’s obvious really: if everybody starts to do it the water pressure drops, the supply is wasted and we all run out of water at the next drought. In many places they need to use pumps (electric, of course) to maintain adequate pressure. Using this as a hydro power source would be ridiculous as they’d need far more energy to pump it than it could possibly generate.
For hydro to be efficient it needs to keep the frictional losses as low as possible. This means the shortest and widest practicable pipes for the hydro supply. That’s why the majority of hydro plants are right at the bottom of the dam, itself. Domestic supply networks are simply not designed for this purpose. A million little 100 Watt generators at the end of miles of narrow piping would use a huge amount more water than a 100MW generator, at the source.
Hey there! Mini hydro technology only collects pressure valve waste energy already being generated by our water transportation service. Therefore, no additional pressure is needed. The process is explained at 2:26.
I found this video trying to understand the variables to make a good turbine. Here is my situation: I live in Alaska off grid. Things that are true: It is dark here in the winter (thus solar is not a great option) and water and rain is abundant and I live on a very steep hill. I do not understand the physics of how the conversion of potential energy (moving water) is then converted into power. If I wanted to make use of hydropower in a very small way what formulas do I need and what factors change the potential to capture the energy most efficiently? This would not be the only source of energy, but I would be great to have as many as possible as there are not services in our area.
In general, the idea is not new; energy restorers are now common for large consumers of high-pressure compressed gas or steam. But these are megawatt capacities for each turboexpander.
In modern high-rise buildings, there is a problem with high potable water pressure on the lower floors.
It is solved in different ways but as a rule. Instead of one common pump station in the basement, two or three small ones are installed (which increases the total cost and increases the dimensions of the mechanical room and the mechanical shaft) and still, for a good quality of maintaining pressure on a particular floor, it is advisable to install pressure reducing valves on the floor as a whole or individually for each apartment. That is, for the best quality, there is no escape from the installation of individual reducing valves.
And instead of them, it would be interesting to install an expander (energy recovery unit). In front of an individual water meter.
1) Easier and cheaper for pump groups.
2) It is more convenient to set the pressure that is comfortable for you (it can even be from a smartphone). In the codes, the pressure is written in a fairly wide range. And in fact, someone gets too high water pressure in the shower, someone insufficient. The pressure-reducing valve is usually located in an inaccessible place and it will require a plumber to adjust it ...
3) It will be fair :), those who live on the lower levels will get more benefits and more energy. Bonus for not having a nice view.
4) It is more visual and more interesting to control energy recovery, everyone sees a specific result, his own result.
5) Or it could even be a three-in-one device: water meter/expander/pressure reducer. With smartphone app and parallel connection to BMS.
Sorry for my English. Hello from a Ukrainian engineer :)
I wish you success in your research and experiments and bring things to the production stage!
I think it makes sense. Hydro power relies on current to create current. If the water pressure is already flowing everywhere, you may as well tap into that source/flow and get whatever power you can from it. It's doing double duty. Giving us water AND power at the same time.
So that makes me wonder just how long it'll be before the utility companies reject it OR start charging us MORE for water, power, or both since now both will be in abundance and thus won't be "worth" as much and that will impact their bottom lines. They won't like that.
I could see something like this being implemented along side some sort of power storage ie… Tesla megawatt batteries to instead of feeding directly into the grid, maybe act as a buffer to prevent brown out situations. It would constantly be charging and be at the ready when power demand jumps higher than power production. Just a thought. Maybe even in home battery backup that just gets … mind the pun… trickle charged each time the water runs.
What's the small in-line product that you had on the garden hose? A link in the description would be nice. Adapting these to down spouts and rain water capture systems would be a very good way to claim energy
Hey there! You can easily buy these online for home use. You need to search for micro hydro turbines home use and you should find some.
Seems like something like that could be part of the answer for energy production. One video I watched where someone was diverting some water from a creek and running it through a generator. When the water had passed through the generator it returned to the creek. The same thing with the mills for grinding grains into flour in times past. The same principle is used in your water meter to tell how much water you used for the month. Also you can tell if you have a leak in your system. Turn all your faucets off and look at the meter. If the counter is moving/spinning, you have a leak. A system like that could only work when the water is moving of course. Off peak hours when people aren't using as much water, less energy would be produced. But then less energy is usually used at the same time. I think you'd still need the power grid, but this could offset your electric bill a bit. Maybe a lot.
An even better idea would be to use the same pressure regulators as the UK which dont release water to reduce the pressure, a spring and diaphram open and close a valve to maintain the corect pressure. This way there is no energy wasted from pumping water out of pressure release valves and no need to add a turbine which wouldnt recover all of the lost energy and is an additional cost in building and maintenance of the system.
I love the idea it's so simple all you do is drop in a turbo fan make sure it's water tight looks cool.
The energy recovered wont even come close to offsetting the research, installation and maintenance of the turbines and the increased energy to pump the water through them. Besides entropic losses, you've got labour and materials to add to the cost of spinning a generator with an electric motor - and thats why nobody is talking about in-pipe hydro generation.
You put the link of motor you used for your mini model, I am gonna try this on my own
It makes no sense that we don't reclaim any of that kinetic energy
This is literally a pipe dream, yes, it is theoretically possible but recovering part of the energy looks complicated and difficult to manage
Presumably this only makes sense in areas where water pressure comes from the fact that water is coming from a higher altitude source. If the water is pumped for pressure and comes from a similar altitude, then there is no way to get more energy out than went into it. This essentially only makes sense if you're using the free acceleration of matter from gravity, or perhaps more correctly, the free transport of matter to a higher altitude via the water cycle.
Hey there! Mini hydro technology only collects pressure valve waste energy already being generated by our water transportation service. Therefore, no additional pressure is needed. The process is explained at 2:26.