How to Save Yourself from Nelson Hydro and City Council

                                             How to Save Yourself From City Council

Since Mr. Love manager of Nelson Hydro is presenting the Nelson Community Solar Garden project and all Nelson hydro customers will be paying for it, one has to do something to continue to live in what is becoming unaffordable Nelson.  Nelson makes money by selling green clean water power, why would we shoot ourselves in the foot and put in expensive solar that will cost 20 times more and lose the profit from the hydro sales to feel green?  This is coming if city council approves it.  After the mayor and others and Mr. Love went to some Austrian Energy institute, they came back with the vision of solar panels for Nelson.

Here is my answer, its called picohydro (even smaller than microhydro).  See my system below.

The beauty of water power is it works 24/7/365,  or 8760 hours a year.  This little $500 system makes more power from November to February  than the city solar garden can make for $400,000.

For $500 or less you can have your own picohydro this one makes about 400 watts.

Thats 9.6kWh /day = 3600kWh/yr.  At retail of 12c/kWh that I pay it takes $72 off my bimonthly electric bill.    I suspect most reading this would be happy to take $72 off their electric bill. 

This picohydro system for $500 makes more power from November through February than the $400,000++ solar garden, simply because it works all the time.   Our water system is gravity, my lights can be on when city power is off.

I figure I will put about 144,000 gallons of treated city water down the drain monthly.  I wonder how much a gallon of treated city water costs?

Now if Nelson was smart and put their already designed microhydro plant in front of the reservoir like Nakusp has done, we would all benefit and have power in future for a century or more at night, in winter a legacy for our grandchildren.  Slocan City is pursuing microhydro.   

Instead, Nelson wants solar panels in the snow for some feel good green misinformed agenda?


Our Nelson hydro manager and engineer came to us from Yukon power, they were putting electric heat tapes on their wind turbine blades because of rime icing,  when this didn't work, they put heat on the blade tips too.   There wasn't enough windpower to run the heat tapes, maybe we can get some cheap heat tapes for our solar panels from Yukon power, the wind turbines no longer function, several million dollars later.  The Nelson dam should easily power the heat tapes, hardly put a dent in the Millions a year it earns for us.
We can all feel good about the solar panels that might make enough power for 4 average homes, for what I estimate to be a $400,000 feel good project.  As Mr. Love told me it will add pennies to my power bill.  Wish I had BC Hydro,  my bill would be 34% lower than it is now from Nelson hydro.

My system above has about the same chance of  making the power I suggest as the 61MWh the solar garden is estimated to earn.   How much is 61MWh?  The average canadian home by BC Hydro stats and others uses 11,00kWh annually.  61,000kWh/11,000kWh = 5.5 homes, but that is pie in the sky everything working perfectly number that is unsupportable by years of data I have already given Mr. Love and his consulting engineer.  Real known data shows maybe 4 average homes. Could I be wrong?  I have the years of experience and real data, they have a computer simulated model.  Does it matter,  4 homes vs 5.5 homes for  $400,000.?

Going Green for those people Mr. Love tells me are asking for it, looks like we will all be bleeding RED.