The Power of Water

Oh wow.

Awesome.

Sam.

Take one.

Okay.

I'm Bob King.

Welcome to my home, which I share with my lovely wife, Annie.

I love water.

I love rivers.

I love free flowing wild rivers.

And I love hydropower.

I suppose it all started in China a few thousand years ago with the first recorded uses of hydropower.

But here in New England, it was, of course, a huge part of our industrial past.

In fact, right here locally and in 1674, a man named Peter Evans was born in what is now Hinsdale or perhaps Northfield.

And he had a friend named Stephen Belden.

Stephen was given a piece of land by the townspeople, and it says right in the deed that he could have this land for free, provided ye shall maintain a sufficient grist mill.

Blew it.

And if ye shall build a sufficient grist mill and maintain it forever, and maintain it forever.

And so Mr. Belden got together with his friend Peter Evans.

And lo and behold, they built this grist mill.

And they must have maintained it for a long time.

Fast forward a few years to to me when I was 11 years old, and after a big Thanksgiving meal, we went for a hike and stumbled on an abandoned hydroelectric power plant.

Windows were blown out, the door was gone.

There was nothing but the big iron carcass of a of a generator in there.

To my mind, it just struck me as an incredible resource.

I imagined what it must have done once to to help light the community around it.

Anyhow, it was only a few months later that the first oil embargo struck the United States, and all of a sudden everybody was talking about energy and the price of energy and the sources of future energy and whether it would be clean and renewable or remained fossil fuels.

And, you know, to me, this just reminded me that, small hydropower locally here in New England is part of the solution.

A wonderful source of local energy.

So there I was.

I had it in mind that I wanted to own and operate my own hydroelectric power plant in New England.

And I had no idea how to do this.

I had no car, but I borrowed my parent's old Dodge Omni and I found this list.

There was literally thousands of dams and abandoned hydro sites across New England.

And of course, there was a time not so long ago when New England got almost all of its energy from hydroelectric power or hydropower.

And I mean, this in itself blew my mind.

And later I did do the research and came to realize this was true, that up until the mid 1940s, most of our electricity, anyway, came from hydropower.

So sooner or later, I stumbled on an abandoned hydro plant in northeast Connecticut that was for sale.

27 year old Bob King is not about to give up on New England's natural energy resource.

Before everybody started talking about energy, it just seemed to me as a young person that hydro electric power was clean and maybe cheap and and that there's plenty of it around because all over New England, we see lots of abandoned stations like this one.

Richard Rossen owns and operates a hydro plant in nearby Putnam, Connecticut.

What's happened here is simply amazing.

I looked at this project about six years ago and I shook my head and left.

I didn't think it was even possible to utilize what was left here.

And that's how I got started.

I immediately got to work combing through junkyards and, you know, any source of material turbines, generators, gearboxes, everything I needed.

I didn't have a lot of money.

And also I had recently traveled in Africa to places like the Congo and Mozambique, where I had seen how much people can do with so little, so little money, so little capital, so little resources.

And I figured if they can do it in Africa, certainly in northeast Connecticut, I can find what I need to rebuild a power plant.

And that was my philosophy and that's what I did.

And I had a lot of help from friends and family who had come down to the site on weekends.

They would leave their clean, normal American jobs and come down and get covered with filth and bruises and scratches working for me at the power plant on weekends.

So my name is Annie Faulkner and I'm married to Bob, and it's been quite an adventure.

When I met Bob, he was working on his first plant in Mechanicsville, Connecticut.

I had imagined, you know, cool little stone waterways and wooden water wheels, the sort of quaint.

New England scene.

And when I got there, it was so much more impressive.

It was concrete and steel and, you know, big, dangerous machines that could hurt you and high voltage.

Bob himself was really impressive to me, too.

So much more than a wild, crazy engineer.

He read a lot.

He understood the multiple dimensions of our environmental and social crises, and he was really committed.

So he lived in a crazy little room that he had built in the rafters of his power plant.

And he lived there with his business partner, Mit, and all the mice that got to enjoy their crumbs.

And he did it with art and creativity and music.

He would invite friends and family to come down and work and get dirty and then have a great party afterwards.

So there were spinning turbines and strobe lights, and it was a little scary because you didn't want to hurt yourself.

In the process of all this.

I got a little publicity and eventually I was contacted by a wonderful family named the Taylors and Lieutenant Colonel Warren H. Taylor, who was also a hydro fanatic.

And he'd heard about what I was doing and he and his son Tim, came down to visit me in Connecticut, and, well, it became the start of a wonderful relationship.

And Tim Taylor remains my business partner to this day.

Well, he was impressed by what you had done down in Mechanicsville, and he pretty much said, Well, I can treat Bob like a son.

He's trustworthy.

He's hard working.

He says, Why don't we, the families, get together and start developing sites?

The first unit in Atkin, they'd got a log or a wicket gate right in the runner and ripped all the blades apart on the runner.

And Bob found someone that had a dye to make the curved blades.

Right.

And you rigged up the dye to your excavator bucket.

To press them out.

We figured out how to cut the right size blade out of a quarter inch quarter inch steel plate, Heat it up red hot, put it in the dye, and then smash it with the excavator bucket to shape perfect shape.

That's why, as I go along, I say, that might be useful in a hydro.

So I get it back store it.

Whereas the American way is just to buy more stuff and when you're done with it, throw it out.

And that's the end of the lifecycle.

Whereas we were recycling equipment that's been around, you know, 60, 70 years some of it.

Yeah.

And or, or the turbines that came out of Maine which were 1910.

There you go.

And then here we are generating zero carbon energy on top of that.

So it's it's really and I think this is what drives all of us is the desire to make a contribution to this world, in this country, in this planet, that a different way to generate electricity to to build stuff, you know, all of it we try to do with a with an eye towards the environmental impact and how to minimize it.

All right.

So I got interested in in hydropower through knowing Bob King.

There we were.

There is a river and there is this high energy guy making electricity.

And you could see that there were that electricity was leaving the building through insulated high voltage lines.

And here he was producing electricity, which is, I think, sort of semi magical in most of our minds because how does it work and where does it go and what does it do in the way between here and there?

The way it works is that somewhere out in your region there is spinning.

Essentially it looks like a big electric motor that's spinning, but it's being powered by something in our case by water.

So we have a turbine inside, usually a pipe or a case, and the water is flowing through the turbine.

The turbine is lots of different kinds, but they look always in some way kind of like a fan of some sort.

And that turbine is attached to a generator which spins and the generator produces electricity.

So all you need is some way of spinning the generator so you can spin a generator with a hydro turbine the way we do, you can spin it through a steam turbine, which can be run by a variety of sources like coal, natural gas, steam generated by a nuclear plant.

You can spin it directly with a gas motor like the little generators that you find, you know, behind the market stalls and farmer's market or on a construction site.

So that makes the generation of electricity particularly interesting.

There's so many ways to generate it.

It's also notable, though, that you can't assume that it's a clean generation source.

There's some incredibly bad sources out there, like dirty coal plants, for example.

So the electricity that goes out through our transformer and it gets boosted up to high voltage because there's less resistance at high voltage and it's sent wherever it needs to be sent and eventually ends up going back through other transformers and into your house in a low voltage farm.

So it won't kill you if something goes wrong and that powers everything in your house.

So there's a physical connection between every generator that supplies your power and your region and the plug in your house.

And the crazy thing about it is that electricity travels at near light speed.

So the delay time between it's generation and the time it arrives in your lamp, you know, on our scale is basically nil.

It's essentially bottled sunlight.

It's a form of energy that you can't see and don't know that it's moving.

There aren't any moving parts in a wire.

And yet this force is moving through it.

And it's really magical stuff and very efficient as well, which makes it.

I think we're thinking about worth knowing about.

So what we've got here is we got the dam that was built in 1836 out of wood.

In the 1960s.

It was filled with concrete, which is why it still holds back water.

But that's why it looks kind of funky is because it's a wooden skeleton.

I was asked, does every hydro plant need a power canal?

And the answer is no.

But this one has a canal so that it generates more head or drop as the water gets further and further away from the dam, the river is going down and the canal isn't, which means the drop increases as you go.

So the water comes down, the canal turns outside, goes right under where you people are, and just goes down into a giant like ten foot diameter pipe that slowly squeezes it down into a turbine, which is only about eight feet around.

And that's where the water goes through the turbine shoots straight down, and in the process spins the wheel, which thereby spins a great big generator, which you will see.

And the generator is what makes electricity.

So it's really remarkably simple.

And the water goes out the back and right back to the Westfield River.

Folks, the reason I yanked out this book is because I have an essay in it that I wrote entitled Cap the Grid.

And it's the basic concept that humans, we can't keep growing endlessly, you know?

Yes, let's build lots of solar and wind and even small hydro.

But all of these have an environmental impact.

And can we just figure out a way to stop getting bigger and bigger and bigger?

That's kind of what this book is about.

And that's part of what my life's work is about.

And we need as much clean energy as we can get, especially if we can cap the grid and not keep needing more and more.

Annie K take one.

There was a project out at Stanford University called the Uncommon Dialog to bring together dam owners and environmentalists and river enthusiasts to talk about the future of hydropower and how it can be helpful in terms of clean, green energy to address the impact of climate change.

All of these parties came together and came up with a framework for how to address the 90,000 dams that exist currently all across the United States to remove some dams, to let the rivers run freely, to retrofit some dams, to provide clean green energy, and to rehabilitate some dams that were a threat or are a threat to public safety.

So Bob was involved with the hydropower owners and helped to set up a meeting here in New Hampshire on the Connecticut River at the Wilder Dam to bring together hydro owners, river enthusiasts and environmentalists to talk about the introduction of the 21st Century Dams Act.

With these dams, you don't need to address the same permitting obstacles that you might have creating brand new energy facilities.

And we don't have that time given what's happening to our climate already, we need to dramatically reduce our carbon footprint to address the impacts of climate change right now.

It's not a matter whether you're right or left.

The main thing is common sense.

Now, the problem we have with a lot of the conservatives is they think this global climate change is a bunch of hooey.

Bob and I saw it firsthand with the site that we had out in New York, where we ended up with three floods in about an eight year time, two of them 100 year floods and one a 500 year flood.

And that's the one that came through the windows of the power plant and flooded our high voltage generators completely underwater, 2400 volt generators.

They didn't like that.

No.

And along with all the sewage from the local treatment plant they had there.

So when we dug it out, it really smelled pretty sweet.

When you start seeing that occur in just one location, you say something is wrong here and you go back through the records and you see 30, 40 years in the past before they had anything similar to that and and you say that's not right.

I mean, the Mill foundation that was there.

It got washed some of it away was a mill building that been there for 100 years and and we're seeing floods that are taking it away the foundation.

Saying, not right.

The interesting thing today is that climate change, as far as how it affects hydropower, well, we are both part of the solution to climate change being zero carbon energy.

And we are in the crosshairs of climate change because of how the weather is changing.

At one of our dams, we had already started to literally cut off the top of the dam, cut through three foot thick reinforced concrete with great big diamond saws so that we could essentially create a larger water passage, a larger area for floodwaters to pass because we knew that climate change was bringing more severe floods and more often.

Lo and behold, in the midst of cutting the concrete blocks off, we had a flood.

The river wasn't going to wait around for us to finish the job.

Instead, the river lifted several seven ton concrete blocks and threw them off the dam right onto our scaffolding.

Basically reminded us that as climate change worsens, which it is doing, you know, it'll become more destructive and more disruptions to ecosystems and people and you know, this reminds us why we are even in this industry in the first place, which is to provide more clean energy.

So the climate crisis has a twin crisis and it's mass extinction.

So humans are causing the sixth mass extinction on planet Earth.

Plants and animals and others are going extinct at a rate something like a thousand times faster than normal.

Populations of wildlife are crashing all over the world.

And it's it's very scary and it makes me very sad because the complexity and the abundance of nature of wild creatures on the planet is a gift that is millions of years in the making.

And we are we are destroying it, we are squandering it, and we can't really ever get it back.

And of course, the extinction crisis and the climate crisis go hand in hand.

Deforestation drives climate change and climate change itself is driving extinction even faster.

So the two are very much go together.

So land conservation, for me, confronted multiple dimensions of the environmental crises.

It required humility and restraint.

It created wildlife habitat.

I just loved having a lot of green on the map and a lot of places where there weren't tons of people and roads and logging.

I spent a lot of time as a young person climbing and backpacking, so I think I just fell in love with big wild landscapes and it was an opportunity to create that here.

If humans could give back some of the earth to wild nature, there would be room for everything.

We'd have room for wild rivers, we'd have room for wild, open mountaintops.

And we would be able to accept that some rivers are going to be dammed and some mountaintops are going to have wind farms on them.

But we need to pull back and make sure there's room for wild nature.

So I think the challenges in front of us are quite clear.

If you step back and look a little bit at it.

When I was, I'm 57 years old, when I was a kid, there were 3 billion people in the world.

Now there are eight.

And the world hasn't changed size.

The atmosphere hasn't changed size.

And yet we continue to produce more and more stuff.

And we've just reached the point where we have to be careful figuring out where in the weave your interest lies and where you can fit in and how you can make a difference, even a small difference.

That's really the challenge.

So I remember someone telling me a long time ago that optimism and pessimism were distractions and that instead we should focus on hope because hope is essential.

Like we're never going to get through this if we're not hopeful that maybe what we're doing is actually going to make a difference and we won't actually live long enough, any of us, to know whether what we're doing is making a big enough difference.

But we still have to do it because, you know, we're here, we got to do it.

You know, the land conservation that that you work on and, you know, the clean energy that we work on, including our new solar project, all these things do make a difference.

Do they make a difference fast enough and not at a large enough scale?

Probably not.

But that's why we need more people jumping on the bandwagon and having the fun that we have.

Because let's face it, our work is fun on a good day.

You know, Sam and I love what we do and we just get a kick out of working by beautiful rivers and seeing this amazing, very simple machinery, you know, so efficiently spin a kilowatt hour meter and send electricity out into the grid.

It's it's a wonderful it's a wonderful sensation.

So looking into the future as much as we can, what I imagine is a future where the solutions are really interesting to be involved in.

For example, when I was a kid, my father would talk to us about electric cars and tell us how great they're going to be.

Now, my company car is an electric car.

We plug it in at hydro sites.

It's better in every way than an internal combustion engine.

Simpler, quieter, more powerful, better, much cheaper to run.

So the future can be exciting and I think is very exciting.

It's just the work itself is lots of fun.

What I imagine is a carbon free energy portfolio here in New England and all across the country and around the world frankly.

What I imagine is a New England landscape with wild forests in every town and in between deep forests so big you can still get lost.

I also imagine a human culture that looks at trees as homes for other beings and old trees as the best carbon capture technology ever invented.

We need to imagine a world where we can stop thinking about unlimited growth as the end all because in the end, if we can do that a growing natural abundance, I think we will find actually more meaningful than than the material abundance that we all seem to be after today.

I think about a year ago, Germany, for a short period of time in the middle of a windy day with Sun, ran their whole country off of renewable power.

I imagine envision a day when the United States can do the same.

Think about that.

The entire nation running off of renewable power, even for a short period at first.

It's possible there are people who have done it.

I look forward to it.

I hope it happens in my lifetime.

In fact, I hope it happens in the next ten years.

I love water.

I love rivers.

I love hydropower.

And did you wonder what happened to that guy, Peter Evans, who was told to maintain the water mills there in the lower Ashuelot forever?

Well, Peter had a son, Lieutenant John Evans, who with his wife Lydia, had a son, Uriel, who had a son, Columbus, who had a son, John who had a son, Kareille, who had a son, Frederick, who with his wife Dorothy, had a daughter, Elizabeth, who had a son, Robert, and that's me, Robert Evans King.

So I'm still active, maintaining the dams in the Lower Ashuelot Basin.

300 years later.

Truly in that you could fall into a chasm.

And I don't know if there was a railing around it yet, but it's like you just had to be careful, you know, rocking out to strobe lights around, spinning equipment.