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The metals that the water of Long Lake helped mine were precious, but so is the energy the flow of that water can generate. Near Stewart, British Columbia, and the Alaska border, Long Lake has been the site of mining operations for more than 100 years, but it currently is being mined for its hydroelectric power.

“At 780 meters of head, it is one of the highest head hydro projects in North America,” Principal Paul Kemp asserts. His company, Canadian Pro­jects, has been working on the Long Lake hydroelectric project for more than eight years, assisting with permits and approvals, undertaking the design and overseeing its construction.

“Head is the elevation drop from the water level at the intake to the outlet level of the turbine,” Kemp says. “It’s the physical vertical elevation drop the water travels through the system.”

That drop over a distance of approximately 7.1 kilometers is what creates the force to turn the powerhouse’s turbines. A small mining dam originally built at the turn of the 20th century was removed about 15 years ago and two new ones – the first approximately 18 meters high and a second somewhat smaller saddle dam – are being built for this project.

“We’re rebuilding the dam slightly bigger with a different style for the hydro facility, and we’re making use of the original natural lake there,” Kemp says. “The Premier Gold Mine dam had established a reservoir. We’re making that reservoir a little larger. We have two months of water storage for this facility. So we can dispatch energy when the market requires it and substantially shape its delivery on a daily basis, as well as seasonally to a degree.”

The estimated $90 million construction of the hydro project owned by Long Lake Hydro Inc. began in the summer and is due for completion by the end of 2012. Canadian Projects is providing the engineering, and construction monitoring of the project. A consortium of three contractors called WEN Constructors Partnership (WEN) is building the project along with some local subcontractors.

WEN consists of contractors West­ern Versatile Con­struc­tion Corp., Lang­ley, British Columbia; EBC Inc., Saint-Nicolas, Quebec; and Neilson Inc., L’ancienne-Lorette, Que­bec.

Innovative Turbine

Canadian Projects Limited provides design engineering and project management for renewable energy projects across Canada. “We are known for creating practical, cost-effective projects using innovative engineering solutions,” Kemp says. Canadian Projects Limited works with companies like Summit Environmental, which produces environmental assessment (EA) documents.

“The EAs are submitted to regulators for project approval,” Kemp ex­plains. “We’ve done a number of hydro projects with Summit – in British Columbia mostly – and a lot of site in­vestigation and regulatory work for prospect projects.

“We typically manage a number of companies to do some of the regulatory work, environmental work and site investigation – things that are more in the specialty areas.”

A new technology that Canadian Pro­jects is commercializing in North Am­erica with Coastal Hydropower is call­ed very low head (VLH) hydro. It generates power from head differentials of only 3 to 4 meters.

“There are a number of research tech­nologies out there that have been striving to develop this type of commercial turbine to produce power from such a low drop, and they haven’t been viable,” Kemp asserts. “It was originally conceptualized in Canada but developed in France with people that we’ve been doing business with for over two decades now.”

How It Works

The VLH turbine produces half a megawatt of electrical power per unit. “The idea of it is this turbine slides into an existing dam or lock on existing waterways,” Kemp explains. “It replaces the gates and produces power from water that normally just was spilled down either lake outlets, canals or lock systems.”

“The advantage of this technology with the most recent fish testing is that it has demonstrated a 100-percent fish survivability – no fish mortality.”

Additionally, because the turbines would be installed on or adjacent to existing structures, the majority of the environmental impact has already occurred on the site.

“It’s a very slow rotating permanent magnet generator type of technology that only operates at about 35 rpm,” Kemp notes. “That’s what gives it its fish friendliness.

“It can connect to distribution voltage as opposed to transmission voltage, so no new power lines are needed. It actually stabilizes and improves the quality of electricity in the local region where they get de­ploy­ed.”

More than 80,000 sites in North Am­erica are candidates for installation of several VLH turbines per dam. “If we only captured a small percentage of that, that would be a lifetime of work for us,” Kemp says.