ADVERTISEMENT
Canyon Hydro: Custom-Designing Efficient Small Hydro Turbines
A Canyon Pelton turbine.
C
anyon Hydro is a U.S. designer and manufacturer of custom hydro turbines, including micro hydro installations that can aid rural, off-grid communities or power remote buildings. In this interview, Brett Bauer, Canyon Hydro’s vice president of engineering, tells us about the company’s services, including manufacturing new turbines, refurbishing old ones, and aiding municipalities to recover energy from existing water systems. Hydro Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position. Brett Bauer: I studied mechanical engineering at the University of Washington. Working at Canyon Hydro was my first real job after graduating from college in 1994. I wasn’t aware of the industry growing up, but when I moved to this town, I really needed a job. Canyon Hydro gave me a chance, and I’m still here. It’s been a great fit. Hydro Leader: Please tell us about Canyon Hydro as a company.
22 | HYDRO LEADER | November/December 2021
and Company of Springfield, Ohio, which had been building turbines since 1862. We’re carrying on that legacy by manufacturing and servicing Leffel turbines as well as manufacturing and servicing our own turbines. We are still based in the Bellingham area. We have 40–50 employees. Most of them work in our engineering and manufacturing departments and stay in our machine shop here. We send people on the road as necessary during overhaul efforts. We’ve manufactured Pelton turbines up to 27 megawatts (MW), and we’ve had the chance to overhaul and refurbish machines from multiple manufacturers up to about 65 MW. Hydro Leader: Where around the country and the world are you active today? Brett Bauer: We are primarily active in the Americas and the UK. The bulk of our business is in the western United States. We’ve installed a few machines in Honduras and Costa Rica and a couple as far south as Chile and Peru. We have an office in Chile, where we had a customer build a couple of machines in the 1 MW range. He handled the sales increase in that region for us. We were also able to build 30–40 machines for projects in the UK throughout its recent small hydro boom, which occurred over the last 10–15 years. Hydro Leader: Who are your customers? Brett Bauer: We have a wide range of customers. We manufacture units from 10–20 kilowatts (kW) on the low end up to around 25 MW on the high end, and across that range alone there are quite a few different types of hydroleadermagazine.com
PHOTOS COURTESY OF CANYON HYDRO.
Brett Bauer: Canyon is a small, family-owned company that started in 1976 in a small town outside Bellingham, Washington. We started manufacturing Pelton turbines first, in the late 1970s, and then started building Francis turbines in the 1990s. Pelton and Francis turbines have been most of our business since then. In 2017, we purchased a small company from the Seattle area called SoarTech, which had designed an in-line turbine (ILT) for replacing pressure-reducing valves. We’ve been manufacturing those here since 2017. Then, in 2019, we purchased James Leffel
A Canyon Francis turbine.
