Hydro Leader September 2021

Leader ydro H VOLUME 12 ISSUE 8

Herbie Johnson: Rehabilitating Southern Company’s Hydro Fleet

september 2021

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Herbie Johnson: Rehabilitating Southern Company’s Hydro Fleet

Contents

September 2021 Volume 2, Issue 8 5 H ydropower: A Critical Part of the Energy Transition

By Kris Polly

24 V igor Industrial: Specialized Steel Fabrication for the Hydro Industry and Beyond

8 Herbie

Johnson: Rehabilitating Southern Company’s Hydro Fleet

28 L ignum Vitae LLC: Growing Environmentally Safe Water-Lubricated Bearings From Trees

14 The U.S. Department of Energy’s Guidebook for Hydropower Projects

38 JOB LISTINGS

Hydro Leader is published 10 times a year with combined issues for July/August and November/December by

an American company established in 2009.

STAFF: Kris Polly, Editor-in-Chief Joshua Dill, Managing Editor Tyler Young, Writer Stephanie Biddle, Graphic Designer Eliza Moreno, Web Designer Caroline Polly, Production Assistant and Social Media Coordinator Cassandra Leonard, Staff Assistant Milo Schmitt, Media Intern SUBMISSIONS: Hydro Leader welcomes manuscript, photography, and art submissions. However, the right to edit or deny publishing submissions is reserved. Submissions are returned only upon request. For more information, please contact our office at (202) 698-0690 or hydro.leader@waterstrategies.com.

ADVERTISING: Hydro Leader accepts half-page and full-page ads. For more information on rates and placement, please contact Kris Polly at (703) 517-3962 or hydro.leader@waterstrategies.com.

CIRCULATION: Hydro Leader is distributed to all hydroelectric facility owners in the United States, to hydrorelated businesses, and to every member of Congress and governor’s office. For address corrections or additions, or if you would prefer to receive Hydro Leader in electronic form, please contact us at admin@waterstrategies.com.

Copyright © 2019 Water Strategies LLC. Hydro Leader relies on the excellent contributions of a variety of natural resources professionals who provide content for the magazine. However, the views and opinions expressed by these contributors are solely those of the original contributor and do not necessarily represent or reflect the policies or positions of Hydro Leader magazine, its editors, or Water Strategies LLC. The acceptance and use of advertisements in Hydro Leader do not constitute a representation or warranty by Water Strategies LLC or Hydro Leader magazine regarding the products, services, claims, or companies advertised. hydroleadermag

hydro_leadr

/company/water-strategies-llc hydro.leader

Do you have a story idea for an upcoming issue? Contact our editor-in-chief, Kris Polly, at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.

4 | HYDRO LEADER | September 2021

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COVER PHOTO:

Herbie Johnson, Hydro General Manager, Southern Company. Photo courtesy of Southern Company.

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PHOTO COURTESY OF SOUTHERN COMPANY.

20 R ye Development: Proving the Long-Term Value of Pumped Hydro

32 G E Renewable Energy: Teaching Future Generations About Hydropower

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Hydropower: A Critical Part of the Energy Transition

A

s we move further into the 21st century, it is becoming clearer and clearer that hydropower will play a central role in the transition to a more renewable, carbon-free grid. And that means that large-scale projects to rehabilitate hydro fleets and advance new hydro and pumped storage projects will become more common and more important.

Southern Company is one of the largest producers of electricity in the United States with 42,000 megawatts (MW) of generating capacity, and with approximately 2,800 MW generated by hydropower, it is one of the top hydropower producers in the nation. Over the next 10–15 years, Southern Company will be carrying out a complete overhaul of its 29 hydropower facilities. In our cover interview, we speak with Herbie Johnson, Southern Company’s hydro general manager, about the progress of this important initiative.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently released a pumped storage guidebook intended to help potential developers of pumped storage facilities evaluate the services those facilities would provide and thus help advance those projects. We hear from professionals from two of the five labs that helped develop this guidebook—Vladimir Koritarov of Argonne National Laboratory and Dominique Bain and Greg Stark of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory—about the importance of this project. The DOE also cooperated with several developers on case studies to test whether the evaluation guidebook was providing trustworthy information. We speak with Ushakar Jha and Erik Steimle of Rye Development, which took part in one of the case studies, about their experience.

By Kris Polly

We also feature two companies who provide specialized services to hydropower clients. Benton Strong and Brian Akin of Vigor Industrial tell us about their company’s specialized steel fabrication services, which include building miter gates, tainter gates, valves, and fish screens for dams.

Then, Bob Shortridge of Lignum Vitae North America tells us about how he discovered lignum vitae, the hard, resinous wood that creates some of the world’s best bearings, and how he built up his company, which creates water-lubricated bearings for hydro applications around the world.

GE Renewable Energy’s Denver-area office recently decided to launch a course on renewable energy and the transition to noncarbon generation for a local high school.

Matt Pevarnik, the senior sales leader for GE Hydro at GE Renewable Energy, tells us about the genesis of the idea and how the class went.

As even many high schoolers today know, hydropower and pumped storage promise to be key elements of our future power supply. The professionals we feature in this month’s Hydro Leader are helping to make that into a concrete reality. H Kris Polly is the editor-in-chief of Hydro Leader magazine and the president and CEO of Water Strategies LLC, a government relations firm he began in February 2009 for the purpose of representing and guiding water, power, and agricultural entities in their dealings with Congress, the Bureau of Reclamation, and other federal government agencies. He may be contacted at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.

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Herbie Johnson: Rehabilitating Southern Company’s Hydro Fleet

Unit 5 at Southern Company’s Lay Dam, located near Clanton, Alabama, was modernized in 2020.

S

outhern Company is one of the largest producers of electricity in the United States, with 42,000 megawatts (MW) of generating capacity. It has 9 million customers and businesses nationwide, with electric utilities in three states and natural gas distribution utilities in four. Approximately 2,800 MW of Southern Company’s power is generated by hydropower, making it one of the top hydropower producers in the nation. Over the next 10–15 years, Southern Company will be carrying out a complete overhaul of its 29 hydropower facilities. In this interview, we speak with Herbie Johnson, Southern Company’s hydro general manager, about how Southern Company is planning and carrying out this vital work.

Herbie Johnson: I spent 6 years in the military, then used the GI Bill to attend Auburn University, where I obtained a bachelor of science in civil engineering. I interviewed with the Alabama Power Company and started working in

8 | HYDRO LEADER | September 2021

Hydro Leader: Please tell us about Southern Company.

Herbie Johnson: Southern Company has three regulated utilities: Mississippi Power Company, Alabama Power Company, and Georgia Power Company. We also have a natural gas company and a competitive wholesale firm called Southern Power. We currently serve 9 million customers through these subcompanies. We also supply transmission and distribution, fiber optics, and network communication services. Our brand is focused on excellent customer service, high reliability, and affordable prices. For more than a century, we’ve been in business building the energy future.

Hydro Leader: What role does hydropower play in Southern Company’s overall operations? hydroleadermagazine.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF SOUTHERN COMPANY.

Hydro Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

hydropower right out of college in 1994. My first job was as a hydrologist, and I worked in the plants and helped support upgrades. I worked my way up to be the general manager of all the Southern Company hydro facilities.

Herbie Johnson: The company originally started with hydro, so our hydro operations have been around for 100 years.

Today, we rely on hydro more than ever. It’s part of our plan to make our operations net zero carbon by 2050. It adds flexibility to how we can bring renewable energy sources into our market. Hydropower can be used to store and dispatch energy, so it saves our customers money on fuel costs. The Georgia and Alabama Power Companies have 2,800 MW of hydro generation across 102 units at 29 dams. The 2,800 MW of hydro generation makes up 5–7 percent of Southern Company’s total generation mix— the percentage varies depending on how much rainfall we get in a year.

Hydro Leader: When did Southern Company realize that it needed to undertake a major rehabilitation of its hydropower infrastructure, and how did that planning get started?

Herbie Johnson: Several of our hydropower plants are over 100 years old. They were built well and have stood the test of time. Many others are 60–80 years old and are at the end of their design life. Components have worn out, the balance of plant equipment has worn out, and electronics and technology have to be modernized to keep up with changes in technology. We must maintain the structural integrity of the dams and spillway gates and ensure that they are adapting and will stand up to the elements for the long term. That’s part of our scope as well. Southern Company has always invested in hydro facilities when they hit the end of life, and simply because of the age of our fleet, a big wave of units is reaching the end of life all at one time.

I already mentioned the services hydro facilities provide to our grid and their flexibility. But there’s another aspect of hydro that is important to us at Southern Company.

A hundred years ago, where these hydro plants were built, they were out in the middle of nowhere. You had to build a village to support their construction. Over the last 100 years, what were once poor communities have become prosperous communities anchored by the reservoirs behind our dams. The houses, businesses, and recreational opportunities around our lakes draw people in.

They spend money, it adds to the tax base, and that helps create better schools, hospitals, and roads. Reinvestment in hydro doesn’t just help us keep making energy and help keep these units generating for our customers, it also helps preserve the wonderful communities around our lakes and reservoirs. We need these communities to have confidence that we see our hydro facilities as forever assets.

Hydro Leader: What does the rehab effort entail, and where are you in the process?

Herbie Johnson: We’re just getting started with our 10‑year plan. Our plan remains flexible in the sense that we are spending capital dollars when appropriate and approved, hydroleadermagazine.com

so it could end up taking up to 15 years total. Overall, we expect more than $3 billion to go into Southern Company’s hydro fleet. We expect more than 70 new turbines to go into our plants. We expect more than 50 generators to be rewound. We will also be rehabilitating and replacing spillway gates, header gates, stop logs, balance of plant equipment, switch gears, transformers, and control systems.

It’s a total reinvestment in these plants. Our goal is to have them running reliably for the next 80 years.

So far, we have completed the modernization of two units: Lay unit 5 and Terrora unit 2 were completed in 2020.

However, we have been planning for longer. We started thinking about the vendors we were going to use 10 years ago, recognizing that no one vendor can do all this work and that certain units would require specialized vendors. We started finding quality vendors and figuring out who would be the best to support certain types of work.

Hydro Leader: What are the biggest challenges of a rehab effort like this?

Herbie Johnson: The majority of the time it is not possible to disassemble one of our hydro units to inspect it prior to going out to bid the work. With that in mind, the biggest challenges are the unknown, discoverable items that you find as you carry out the total rehab of a unit. In some cases, you don’t have drawings of the unit at all. A lot of them are lost. Some of the plants have been there for 100 years, and we don’t have knowledge of what to expect on the inside because we’ve never taken the unit apart. A lot of the time, the first time you see the major components involved in the upgrade is during the disassembly. That’s when you find things that you didn’t expect. We’re good at creating flexibility in our contracting, schedules, and budgets to account for those unknowns and discoverable items.

Hydro Leader: What kind of outage planning are you doing for this?

Herbie Johnson: The majority of our plants have multiple units, but due to the fleet’s age and the way the units were designed, we can only work on one unit in a plant at a time.

It’s important that we determine which unit is most at risk and in the worst shape, start with that, and then continue to the others. The scheduling of that is important. At different times of the year, plants and units must be operating to meet environmental and recreational needs. We’ve got to meet Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) guidelines.

In some locations, we’ve got to manage flood control. All those aspects go into how we schedule and plan outages.

Most of these outages last 10–12 months, starting from the time when we take a unit apart to the time we get our new components and take it through startup.

From a fleet standpoint, as we get further into our modernization effort, we’re going to have a lot of work going September 2021 | HYDRO LEADER

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Unit 2 at Southern Company’s Terrora Dam, located near Lakemont, Georgia, was modernized in 2020.

10 | HYDRO LEADER | September 2021

know how many people and the type of people we’re going to need and when we’re going to need their support.

Hydro Leader: What kind of public outreach efforts have you done to prepare for this effort?

Herbie Johnson: Our regulated utilities in both Georgia and Alabama are regulated by the public hydroleadermagazine.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF SOUTHERN COMPANY.

on. We’re going to have multiple hydro vendors and craft workers at multiple plants. There will also be significant project management and supply chain tracking budgets. As that starts to stack up, it’s going to be quite a lot of work. If you don’t have everything planned in detail up front, you’ll get really overwhelmed. We feel that we have a great plan and that we have balanced all those priorities. We believe that we’re addressing the units with the highest risk first. We

ADVERTISEMENT service commission. Maintaining your business cases, communicating with your public service commission, and having timely and accurate information is critical to the outreach. It’s something we vow to do, and I think we do it well at Southern Company. From a customer standpoint, we partner with the land organizations that help manage our reservoirs and recreational opportunities.

Quite often, outages or reservoir drawdowns, which may be necessary to support certain kinds of work, affect recreational events. That’s where you really have to make use of your public relations group and make sure that the customers understand the reasons for the interference and how long it will last. We communicate using a variety of media, including Instagram, Facebook, the normal distribution list in our local newspapers, and an app called SmartLakes.

Hydro Leader: What economic effect will the rehab effort have on the areas where your hydro facilities are located?

Herbie Johnson: We have made a focused effort to maximize the use of local suppliers, consultants, and contractors. We also make a strong effort to patronize diverse suppliers and small business owners. We try to bring as many of the small and diverse suppliers into these work efforts as we can.

The majority of those are local, which means that there is a direct positive economic effect on our communities. When we need to send parts off for rehabilitation, we try to find shops in our local communities. If there’s an area where we can positively affect a community that needs it, we always try to give it priority and work with it. These are longerduration jobs, and that can provide great benefit to these communities. This total plan will take 10–15 years, so there will be workers staying in the local hotels and eating at the local restaurants. That is also true of people who work for the suppliers and the transportation support, who also tend to be local.

Hydro Leader: What is your message to the federal government?

Herbie Johnson: I’ll speak directly to FERC, which governs the licensing process for our hydro plants. FERC recently made a move to a 40‑year license. I would like to thank FERC for that. It gives us some assurance that as we’re making these investments, we can make plans about how we’re going to run the units and what specifications we should build into our process. I think FERC made an excellent decision there. It has got an excellent template for licensing renewals. My message to FERC is to stay the course, keep the process efficient, and hold stakeholders accountable for timeliness and participation on the front end.

I would also encourage FERC to support pumped storage facilities, especially closed-loop pumped storage, and to help keep the licensing and construction process efficient. hydroleadermagazine.com

Hydro Leader: Is there anything you would like to add?

Herbie Johnson: We’re doing some great things in our effort to become carbon net zero by 2050. We have closed and converted a lot of coal plants and have added a lot of renewable energy. We are building two new nuclear units right now, the first in the United States in three decades; they’re getting close to their startup. As I mentioned earlier, hydro’s flexibility makes it as valuable today as it was 100 years ago, if not more so. In fact, all the stuff we’re doing right now really plays to hydro’s favor, especially in the area of pumped storage. Since the 1970s, Southern Company has been looking at local land features that could support additional pumped storage hydro. We designed and built Wallace Dam and the Rocky Mountain pumped storage facility. We brought Rocky Mountain online in the early 1980s and then sold majority ownership to Oglethorpe Power; now, we’re only a part owner. As we invest more and rely more on solar and wind and need more energy storage facilities, I think Southern Company is going to continue to keep pumped storage hydro in mind as a key part of the potential equation. Here at Southern Company, we use the phrase “Keep all arrows in the quiver,” and pumped storage hydro as a large-scale storage option is something we’re going to continue to look at. I think there are over 50 preliminary licenses for pumped storage hydro in the U.S. market right now. There’s a lot of opportunity there.

Hydro Leader: What is your vision for the future?

Herbie Johnson: I used the term forever asset, and that sums up my key vision. I want the new employees we’re hiring to support these plants to know, whether their job is in dam safety, operations at the plant level, or reservoir operations, that they’re walking into a plant that’s going to be modern and built with their safety in mind. It’s going to be built to have minimal maintenance requirements. I want them to have the confidence that they’re entering an area of work that’s going to be around for them for the long term and that will hopefully support their healthy and well-earned retirements. I want to project that same confidence to our communities. We need people to continue to buy houses around the lakes, to buy boats to fish in the lakes, and to enjoy the recreational opportunities. All of that adds to these communities. I want them to hear from us that these are forever assets and that that is reflected in how we’re treating them and the quality of work we put into them. H Herbie Johnson is the general manager of hydro at Southern Company. He can be contacted at hnjohnso@southernco.com.

September 2021 | HYDRO LEADER

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SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF DAMS AND LEVEES

The 2022 USSD Annual Conference will be held in beautiful San Diego at the newly renovated Town and Country Resort (towncountry.com).

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USSD MISSION:

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With its complex nexus of relationships between coastal and riverine systems, low-lying and mountainous typologies, urban density and suburban sprawl, and rich wildlife and habitat history, San Diego is a great place for dam and levee practitioners to come together and discuss topics related to the conference theme. Up the Interstate-5 freeway in Carlsbad, CA is the famous LEGOLAND theme park, home to the Legos we assembled as kids and perhaps reminding us of our childhood inspiration

USSD VISION: A world where all dams and levees are safe and valued by the communities they serve

to become engineers and scientists. Next year’s conference theme is also an opportunity to think about the future generation of dam and levee professionals and how we can set them up for success.

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The U.S. Department of Energy’s Guidebook for Hydropower Projects

Argonne National Laboratory, located in Lamont, Illinois.

T

Hydro Leader: Please tell us about your backgrounds and how you came to be in your current positions.

Dominique Bain: I started working with production cost models in graduate school at Northern Arizona University

14 | HYDRO LEADER | September 2021

in 2014. I continued working with them during my time at A­rizona Public Service in Phoenix. When I started at NREL about 2½ years ago, I started focusing more on hydropower representation in hydro production cost models.

Greg Stark: I’m the technical lead for hydropower at NREL. My background is in power systems engineering and crosssector optimization, and I like looking at the confluence of water and power. I have a mixed background in electrical engineering, finance, and economics.

Vladimir Koritarov: I’ve been with Argonne for 30 years.

I’m currently the program manager for the waterpower program and the director of Argonne’s Center for Energy, Environmental, and Economic Systems Analysis. Before Argonne, I spent about 8 years working as a power system planner at the electric utility of the former Yugoslavia. I am a power systems engineer; my background is in energy systems analysis. Over the years, I’ve done a lot of capacity hydroleadermagazine.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY.

he U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has funded a team of five national laboratories to develop a valuation guidance for pumped storage hydropower. The team has developed and recently published a guidebook to assist developers of prospective pumped storage hydropower projects and other stakeholders in evaluating the services these facilities can provide.

Two of the five labs that contributed to this effort are Argonne National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). In this interview, Vladimir Koritarov of Argonne and Dominique Bain and Greg Stark of NREL discuss the creation of the guidebook, the case studies they carried out to test the valuation methodologies, and the importance of promoting pumped storage as a core component of a future carbon-free grid.

ADVERTISEMENT expansion analyses, production cost analyses, hydrothermal coordination analyses, and pumped storage analyses.

Hydro Leader: Please tell us about NREL. Greg Stark: NREL’s focus is on renewable technologies like wind, solar, and hydropower, as well as up-andcoming resources such as geothermal and hydrogen. The lab started out as the Solar Energy Research Institute and has grown over the years as other forms of renewables have become more common. NREL is the DOE’s only laboratory that falls under the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which differentiates us from the multidisciplinary labs.

Hydro Leader: Please tell us about Argonne National Laboratory.

Vladimir Koritarov: Argonne is one of the 17 national laboratories that are owned by the DOE. It has been around for 75 years. It has about 4,000 employees. We’re a multidisciplinary lab under the DOE’s Office of Science.

We do a lot of basic science as well as applied science. We deal with all energy sources, including hydropower, thermal and nuclear technologies, renewables, and storage.

Hydro Leader: Please tell us about the DOE pumped storage evaluation guidebook.

Vladimir Koritarov: There was a need for a guidebook to help the evaluation of pumped storage projects. While pumped storage projects provide a lot of different services and have an important role in the system, it can be difficult to estimate the value of all these services and their contributions to the grid. Some of those services are not currently compensated in the market. Typically, there is compensation for energy arbitrage; energy generation; and in some markets, capacity value; as well as for some ancillary services like regulation reserve and spinning reserve, but there are no market mechanisms to compensate for other services, such as inertial response and stability.

In principle, there are two market environments that characterize the operation of the power system: regulated utilities and competitive market environments. In competitive market environments, there are revenue streams for those services that you can bid for. In traditionally regulated utilities, you can’t really bid. Those services are provided as part of the normal utility operation. The guidebook addresses both market environments. We provide guidance on how to assess the value of pumped storage facilities in either regulated utilities or the competitive market environment.

Dominique Bain: Pumped storage hydro projects are capital intensive. There’s some hesitancy on the part of integrated utilities to do capital-intensive projects. That is even more hydroleadermagazine.com

true in market systems: there’s no good incentive for capitalintensive projects. However, as we add more wind and solar generation, the benefits of pumped storage hydro become more apparent. It’s useful to start looking at this now, as opposed to 10 years down the road, because capital-intensive projects usually have a long construction timeline and pumped storage hydro often takes about 8–10 years from start to finish.

Greg Stark: We’re seeing more renewables on the grid, and fossil-fuel-fired generation is dropping off. For all the challenges associated with fossil-fuel-fired generation, it is dispatchable, flexible, and makes it easy to integrate wind and solar. When we go to a 100 percent renewable grid, we expect to see hydro and pumped storage hydro filling that role—it’s one of the few renewables that is both dispatchable and flexible, which makes it well matched to renewables integration. The guidebook helps ensure that these capabilities are valued correctly.

Vladimir Koritarov: Pumped storage is important because the Biden administration wants to achieve a carbon-free power sector by 2035. That is an ambitious goal, and to meet it, we have to get to a system that is predominantly based on renewable energy sources, like hydropower, wind, and solar.

However, if you want high renewable penetration in the system, you need a lot of storage. Pumped storage hydro is currently the only mature technology that can provide large quantities of long-duration storage. Different types of batteries typically provide 2–4 hours of energy storage, while pumped storage can provide 8 hours or more. About 94–95 percent of all storage capacity in the United States is pumped storage hydro. The rest is batteries, compressed air, and flywheels. Pumped storage currently stores 99 percent of all energy stored in the United States.

Greg Stark: One of the things we do at NREL is to model the future with a 100 percent renewable grid. In our efforts, we have seen that there can be lulls in renewable energy generation that may require us to draw on energy storage for longer than 8–10 hours. For example, in late summer when there isn’t much wind, you might have to cover for a couple of days. It is in situations like that that the scale of what pumped storage can deliver becomes important, and that’s part of the incentive for developing the guidebook.

Vladimir Koritarov: The winter storm that hit Texas in February 2021 would have been easier to overcome if Texas had had more energy storage. Texas may not be the best place for pumped storage because of the terrain and geography, but it does have some locations for potential new pumped storage projects. During extreme weather events that disrupt the power system for several days, storage is going to be the key to quick recovery without blackouts or extensive damage to the system and the economy.

September 2021 | HYDRO LEADER

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NREL, located in Golden, Colorado.

Hydro Leader: Would you tell us about the contents of the guidebook and how you foresee it being used?

16 | HYDRO LEADER | September 2021

Hydro Leader: One of the steps in this process was updating existing grid models that were potentially out of date.

Would you tell us about that?

Dominique Bain: Part of the purpose of this exercise was to try to see the future. Hydropower assets take 10 years to develop, but they last 50–100 years. They will be around longer than batteries, which tend to run for a maximum of 20 years. In order to accurately develop pumped storage hydro models, we need to think about how pumped storage hydro interacts with other factors, such as how much solar or wind generation there is and how much coal has been retired. As part of that, we updated the production cost model that we use. We created a 2028 base model that was based on work done at Argonne. The base model had about 20 percent wind and about 10 percent solar, and we increased that to 25 percent wind and 15 percent solar hydroleadermagazine.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF NREL.

Vladimir Koritarov: To develop the guidebook, we first looked at the different types of valuation studies and methodologies that have been applied in the past not only to pumped storage but also to other energy storage technologies and to wind and solar. We wanted to use the best methods from those valuation studies to develop a comprehensive, transparent, and objective methodology for the valuation of pumped storage projects. We developed a 15‑step valuation process for pumped storage, which is outlined in the guidebook. The guidebook also has a chapter on different methods that can be used to estimate the value of the different services that pumped storage plants can provide to the grid. The general framework for the valuation process is what we call the cost-benefit and decisionanalysis methodology. We rely on a traditional cost-benefit analysis method to estimate the value of the project, but include a multicriteria decision-analysis step in case you have to decide among multiple alternatives based on both monetized factors and nonmonetized ones, like reliability and environmental impacts.

The guidebook also has an appendix with a list of metrics for different services, an appendix with a catalog of different models and computer software tools that can be used for different types of power system analysis, and appendixes on cost-benefit analysis and on multicriteria decision analysis.

We predict that the manual will be used primarily by the hydropower industry, especially by developers and utilities that are thinking of developing a pumped

storage project. Also, it will be used by consulting and engineering companies that may want to assess new pumped storage hydro projects for their clients. The guidebook also indirectly benefits regulatory agencies and lending organizations, such as the World Bank. If a pumped storage hydro developer performs an analysis using the valuation method proposed in the guidebook, a regulatory agency or lending organization will be able to review the analysis and see if the applicant followed the process and took all the required steps. The valuation analysis proposed in the guidebook is something that decisionmakers can trust, and it provides confidence that the pumped storage hydro developer has done due diligence in assessing the project.

ADVERTISEMENT to create a high-renewable model so that we could see how the value of pumped storage hydro changed as we increased the amount of renewables in the system. We also retired most of the coal from that high-renewable case. No one is going to get something like this 100 percent correct, but there’s a lot of value in understanding that when we retire coal and replace it with wind and solar, the value of production of a pumped storage hydro unit changes. We saw an increase in the revenue that the unit brought in, an increase in cost savings and fuel savings, and curtailment benefits to the whole system.

Hydro Leader: Would you tell us about the case studies you took part in as part of this planning effort?

Dominique Bain: The evaluation guidebook was developed before we did specific case studies. The studies were a sort of check to test whether the evaluation guidebook was giving us trustworthy information. We were applying the guidebook itself to the test cases. We did two test cases based on proposed projects. One was a project of about 400 megawatts (MW) located in Wyoming, and the other was a 1,200 MW project located in the Washington/Oregon area. When we did the production cost modeling, we would run our future case without the pumped storage hydro unit and then we would run it with the pumped storage hydro unit to compare the benefits.

Vladimir Koritarov: We applied the methodology from the guidebook to these projects to test the principles of the valuation process and to see whether we needed to make any improvements in the methodological approach. The analysis will be published in two technical reports that will serve as companion reports to the guidebook. They will serve as examples of how the guidebook methodology was applied by the lab project team to these two proposed projects.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF NREL AND ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY.

Hydro Leader: What kind of outreach are you currently doing around the new guidelines?

Vladimir Koritarov: The guidebook was officially released on World Water Day, March 22, 2021. The DOE had a special press release about the guidebook. There are several web pages that were developed by the DOE’s HydroWIRES initiative. HydroWIRES was initiated by the Water Power Technologies Office and deals with research into how hydropower can best support the power grid. The HydroWIRES website has several pages that illustrate different aspects of the guidebook and describe the project team and the industry partners. Argonne and other labs participating in the project had separate press releases published in different media. In addition to Argonne and NREL, the three other labs that are participating in this project are Pacific Northwest National Lab, Oak Ridge National Lab, and Idaho National Lab. We also have a hydroleadermagazine.com

19-member technical advisory group that includes experts from the hydropower industry, electric utilities, pumped storage hydro developers, electricity market operators, hydropower equipment manufacturers, regulatory agencies, and industry and academic research institutions.

Hydro Leader: Is there anything you would like to add?

Greg Stark: A next step for NREL is to refine our capacity expansion work, in which we look at how a system is likely to be built out for various scenarios over the coming years.

Right now, it involves a lot of simplifications, in which we look at single days to represent each season. However, as I have mentioned, one of the valuable things about hydropower is its ability to deliver stored energy over longer, multiday time frames. A great next step would be to enhance our models so that we can investigate the value of pumped storage and hydropower over these extended periods.

Vladimir Koritarov: Another important thing is that we are developing a pumped storage valuation tool based on the guidebook. The tool will help users apply the valuation process presented in the guidebook. We’re developing an online, publicly available tool that will guide users through the valuation process. It’s a decision-tree tool that will present different paths depending on the type of project the user is evaluating. There are lots of complex analyses involved in this valuation process, but at least users will have this tool to guide them through the process and to let them know what types of analysis need to be done at each step.

We already drafted the beta version, which is being tested.

An enhanced version is going to be available to a wider audience in several months. H

Dominique Bain is an electrical engineer and researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. She can be contacted at dominique.bain@nrel.gov.

Vladimir Koritarov is the director of the Center for Energy, Environmental, and Economic Systems Analysis at Argonne National Laboratory. He can be contacted at koritarov@anl.gov.

Greg Stark is the hydropower technical lead at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He can be contacted at greg.stark@nrel.gov.

September 2021 | HYDRO LEADER

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Rye Development: Proving the Long-Term Value of Pumped Hydro

A diagram of the proposed Goldendale project.

R

Hydro Leader: Please tell us about your backgrounds and how you came to be in your current positions.

20 | HYDRO LEADER | September 2021

Erik Steimle: I’ve been the vice president of project development at Rye for 5 years now. I have over 20 years of experience in new hydropower development in the United States. I made the transition to the development side of hydropower after working on environmental impact statements and managing water infrastructure projects as a consultant. It’s an important time to be involved in new hydropower, as more renewables get incorporated into the grid across the United States.

Ushakar Jha: I’m Rye’s vice president of project engineering. My background is in civil engineering.

While doing my masters research in hydraulics and flood control, I got introduced to hydropower. After graduating, I joined a consulting firm. I worked there for a few years in hydro and eventually decided to focus on the business hydroleadermagazine.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF RYE DEVELOPMENT.

ye Development LLC is a lead developer in new hydropower generation and energy storage. Rye is committed to offering low-impact hydropower and pumped storage as environmentally safe and high-value solutions. With many projects soon to be under construction across the United States, Rye is working with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and its Argonne National Laboratory to evaluate the value of future hydropower infrastructure for offtakers and the grid. In this interview, Rye’s vice president of project development, Erik Steimle, and its vice president of project engineering, Ushakar Jha, tell us about the projects Rye is focusing on, including the Goldendale project, and how the lab studies will help further future projects.

ADVERTISEMENT States have hydropower on them, so that’s a pretty large opportunity. We’re focused on a series of new hydropower and nonpowered dams. We have a cluster in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; six projects in Ohio; four projects in Mississippi; and a project in Louisiana.

Four years ago, we made the case to pursue closed-loop pumped storage on the West Coast due to our analysis that there was an emerging capacity market there based on popular demand, policies such as carbon-free grid initiatives, and the increased use of intermittent sources of electricity.

We are pursuing two pumped storage projects out West: the Goldendale Energy Storage Project, which is one of the projects that was part of Argonne National Lab’s technoeconomic analysis, and the Southern Oregon Energy Storage Project, also called the Swan Lake project. We have limited notice to proceed with the construction of Swan Lake in January 2022 and expect full notice to proceed with construction in January 2023. It’s slated to be the first recent significant pumped storage project in the United States and will have a capacity of 400 megawatts (MW).

There are less than a dozen people currently working at Rye, though we have a long list of consulting engineers, construction companies, and other third-party providers that we have contracts with and rely on for our projects across the United States. As far as in-house staff, we have a considerable network of people on the engineering, design, and planning side.

Hydro Leader: Would you tell us more about the Goldendale project?

part of hydro. I then met with the folks who were involved in hydrokinetics and hydropower at Rye’s predecessor organization, Free Flow Power Corporation. I’ve now worked with Rye for 10 years.

Hydro Leader: Would you tell us more about Rye Development and the role hydropower plays in its overall business?

Erik Steimle: Rye is one of the larger developers of new hydropower in the United States. We’re backed by private equity. Our sole focus is on water infrastructure and hydropower development. We have two types of projects that we are pursuing at this point in time. One is new hydropower at originally nonpowered dams that were built for flood control, irrigation, or navigation. Just over 3 percent of the dams that currently exist in the United hydroleadermagazine.com

Erik Steimle: The Goldendale Energy Storage Project is a 1,200 MW closed-loop pumped storage project with a planned location in Klickitat County, Washington. It sits right in the middle of an energy overlay zone that is home to a significant number of the wind power projects that were constructed in the county in the last 10–15 years. The project itself will be able provide 12–20 hours of on-demand, carbonfree electricity to Pacific Northwest utilities. It connects into the existing transmission system less than 5 miles away at the John Day substation, where multiple Pacific Northwest utilities have transmission rights to access and use a project of this scale. This particular area has been looked at for pumped storage for about 30 years. It’s considered one of the best sites for pumped storage from an engineering perspective due to a combination of factors, such as appropriate geology and geography and proximity to the existing AC/DC transmission grid, which allows the transfer of power from the Pacific Northwest all the way to Southern California. It also has access to water rights. The project entered into a contract with the local utility district to buy water for the one-time spill of the system as well as any additional water needed to offset evaporation during the operation of the facility, because it’s a closed system. The entire project is on private land. There’s one landowner, Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners. The September 2021 | HYDRO LEADER

| 21

ADVERTISEMENT lower portion of the project area was an aluminum smelter, but the smelters have been closed for two decades now, and it’s been the vision of the community to have this area cleaned up. Our project will contribute at least $10 million to clean up of a portion of this area in addition to providing a new source of long-duration energy storage.

Hydro Leader: Since this is a closed-loop or off-river system, do two new reservoirs need to be constructed?

Erik Steimle: Correct. Two new reservoirs are being constructed. Each reservoir is approximately 60 acre-feet in size. The project features that connect the reservoirs, such as the penstock and the powerhouse access, are all subsurface.

Hydro Leader: Would you tell us about the regulatory requirements of developing a project like this?

The John Day Dam on the Columbia River, near the site of the proposed Goldendale project. The now-defunct aluminum plant visible in the background is near the proposed site of the project's lower reservoir.

Hydro Leader: Would you tell us more about the DOE’s technoeconomic study about the long term value of the Goldendale project?

22 | HYDRO LEADER | September 2021

Hydro Leader: Will the results of this study influence decisions you make in developing the project, or is it primarily intended to help attract potential offtakers?

Erik Steimle: Both. A lot of the information is already in the public domain in some form. For people looking at solutions to transmission or energy storage issues, reliability has become an increasingly important topic, especially given the challenges in Texas this past winter and in California, which seems to have a challenge every year. However, I think those challenges are not being looked at in a comprehensive way. Grid managers love pumped storage, but it’s hard to put your finger on how it should be evaluated in a system.

The DOE report is a nice way of evaluating its value and providing a couple of case studies. It’s valuable that the DOE is the entity that has put this out, since it is a third hydroleadermagazine.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES.

Erik Steimle: There are two primary regulations. For a hydro facility, construction and operational licenses are governed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). We’re just a little over halfway through the FERC licensing process. In 2020, FERC accepted our license application, which was built on a few years of preliminary studies. It is currently working through its National Environmental Policy Act analysis and is on schedule to make a decision on issuance of a license in late 2022. Washington State also has a State Environmental Policy Act environmental review process, which is a little faster and is scheduled to be completed in summer 2022.

Erik Steimle: We, as a hydropower developer, were excited about this opportunity because most of the new pumped hydro in the United States is being proposed by privately funded developers. Generally, when we are considering a new project, there are several utilities that would be potential offtakers, and we are able to do a cost-benefit analysis and decide whether we can justify developing the project. The DOE study opportunity meant that we would have Argonne Labs and several other labs participate in estimating the value of this technology. The DOE studies a number of the contributions, looking at the project from different angles, to support the valuation of this type of technology.

For example, our project in southern Oregon is roughly a $900 million project. The Goldendale project is a $2 billion project. The business case is essentially built around popular demand and policies that have led utilities across the Pacific Northwest to a 7,000‑9,000 MW capacity deficit that will grow and peak in the early 2030s. That capacity has to be carbon free. Coal is coming offline. No one can site new thermal plants. The growth of wind and solar power is adding a lot of intermittency to the system. The need for a low-cost, equitable storage solution in an area that’s already dominated by hydro means that pumped storage is a perfect fit for this project.

Our analysis is focused on capacity. The DOE technoeconomic study is looking to thoroughly evaluate the value of pumped storage with regard to power capacity, energy arbitrage, ancillary services, power system dynamic performance, stability, benefits to the system and the utility, and the ability of storage to reduce system cycling ramping costs. One big factor it looked at was transmission benefits.

It also looked at economic development. The DOE’s study of our project gives other utilities across the United States a better tool than some of the specific integrated resource plans that utilities put out about the projects they have under development. When developers propose a project, they look at the full suite of benefits that pumped storage can provide to their systems.

ADVERTISEMENT party rather than an individual utility or developer that may have its own interest in a particular solution.

Hydro Leader: Do you need to line up offtakers for 100 percent of your capacity before launching an effort?

Erik Steimle: We do not need to cover 100 percent of the capacity, but we need to have one particular utility that is interested in more than 50 percent of the capacity of a potential project. Part of the reason we are interested in these two projects in the Pacific Northwest is that where they tie into the grid, there is a long list of utilities with capacity demands requiring long-duration energy storage of the sort that these pumped storage projects can provide. There are lots of places across the United States where these projects are needed, but if only one utility has access to a potential project because of transmission, it can be difficult for a developer to attract private capital and develop something for which you have only one buyer. In this case, we feel more secure because we know that there is a need for thousands of megawatts of capacity and that there are several potential buyers at the interconnection locations.

Hydro Leader: How will this process help the DOE develop guidelines for future pumped storage projects?

Erik Steimle: Outside the West Coast and New England, there are a lot of utilities and planners seeking good studies and guidance on energy storage, whether it’s lithium ion, solar-plus storage, or long-duration storage of the kind provided by pumped storage and other emerging technologies. They are trying to grapple with the costs that those technologies would imply for their systems.

Utilities are having to grapple with systems in which the amount of renewable-based generation could exceed 70 percent. There’s a need to provide reliable storage resources, which is where we see the value of pumped storage. Of course, you need access to water in an area with the appropriate geology and geography—you can’t just go anywhere. It is helpful for the DOE to put out valuation guidebooks and other types of analysis to support the grid and utility decisions. This type of evaluation is helpful for understanding what would be one of the highest-value storage options.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF RYE DEVELOPMENT.

Hydro Leader: What can you tell us about the engineering of a large project like this?

Ushakar Jha: These are complex projects. This is one place where you find almost all the engineering disciplines working together, including electrical, mechanical, and civil.

There are electronics like computers, because cybersecurity needs to be factored into the design process. Transportation is also involved, because you have to get road access. That’s hydroleadermagazine.com

an interesting thing that has kept me working in this industry—there’s no other engineering industry where you get exposure to all the engineering disciplines.

Hydro Leader: Do you foresee more pumped storage projects being built in the future?

Erik Steimle: Yes. We’re going to see a lot more pumped storage being proposed and developed. Utilities are lopsided; some are planning better, and others are adjusting to think about how transportation will look in the next 10–15 years.

They’re also going to be more closely linked to the electrical grid with reliable, on-demand, carbon-free power systems that require long-duration storage assets. Demand for pumped storage as well as lithium ion storage is going to continue to increase.

Ushakar Jha: The evaluation criteria and technoeconomical standards that have been developed as part of this DOE study will help other developers go through the processes that are required to evaluate projects. More sites will be evaluated in the near future.

Hydro Leader: What is your vision for the future of your company and of hydropower and pumped storage?

Ushakar Jha: For the last 10 years, we have been successful in bringing these projects through all the necessary stages and can now start construction. In the near future, I see us building and operating a few of these projects. We will continue to do the same thing that we have done successfully for more than 10 years: starting from visibility, and getting through the review processes of FERC and other agencies, constructing these projects, and then deciding whether to sell them or whether to operate them ourselves.

Erik Steimle: Rye will continue to push forward with projects that help hydro regain its reputation as the backbone of the carbon-free grid. H

Ushakar Jha is the vice president of project engineering at Rye Development LLC. He can be contacted at ushakar@ryedevelopment.com.

Erik Steimle is the vice president of project development at Rye Development LLC. He can be contacted at erik@ryedevelopment.com.

September 2021 | HYDRO LEADER

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Vigor Industrial: Specialized Steel Fabrication for the Hydro Industry and Beyond

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igor is a diversified industrial business that serves a wide variety of markets, including ship repair, marine vessel fabrication, aerospace and defense, bridge construction, nuclear facilities, and the hydropower industry. Its products for the hydropower industry include gates, water control systems, fish control structures, and hydroelectric facilities. In this interview, Brian Akin, Vigor’s director of sales for infrastructure and energy, and Benton Strong, its senior manager for public affairs, tell us about the company’s origins, its current work, and its vision for the future.

Hydro Leader: Please tell us about your backgrounds and how you came to be in your current positions.

Brian Akin: I’m the director of sales for infrastructure and energy at Vigor. I started working in the steel fabrication industry as a summer intern and have worked in estimating, program management, and sales for over 30 years.

Benton Strong: I have worked in communications at the local, state, and federal levels in government, advocacy, and political campaigns. Born and raised a short drive from Vigor’s Harbor Island shipyard in Seattle, I now work on communications for Vigor and manage the company’s government affairs at the local and state levels in Oregon.

Hydro Leader: Please tell us about Vigor.

Brian Akin: Vigor is an industrial company that services the U.S. military, including the U.S. Navy; the cruise ship industry; and other key partners. In addition to ship repair, we have a complex fabrication division. It services the nuclear market, where we are very active; the bridge market; the hydroelectric market; and the aerospace and defense market. We also do new-build construction, including building ferries for the State of Washington and other governments and building specialty watercraft for the U.S. military and international customers. In the hydroelectric field, we service large, complex gates and water control systems and renewable power generation facilities, which are common in the Columbia and Snake River systems, right in our backyard.

24 | HYDRO LEADER | September 2021

1,500 of whom are in the Portland region, which is also where we do our hydro work. Currently, our complex fabrication is primarily done in our locations in the greater Portland metro area. Vigor operates as part of Titan Acquisition Holdings, our parent company. Other parts of the family of companies under Titan include MHI, based in Norfolk, Virginia, and Continental Maritime of San Diego, California.

Hydro Leader: Please tell us about your products.

Brian Akin: People turn to us first and foremost because of our ability to build large, complex structures. We are a full turnkey integrator of these systems, by which I mean that we fabricate, machine, and also provide the coatings for these components. Our ability to ship both nationally and internationally is another big advantage. We are active in the Midwest and on the East Coast for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation, and private energy companies. In hydro, we’ve gone as far as Ceresco Dam in Puerto Rico. The foundation of these capabilities is our tremendously skilled workforce.

Hydro Leader: Would you give us some examples of the hydro-related work you do?

Brian Akin: We have done significant work in the Midwest for the Army Corps, which has long been a valued customer.

We have built a wide variety of water control gates for the three rivers that converge on the Pittsburgh District in the Ohio Valley. Our work in the Northwest on the Snake and Columbia tributaries from the Portland area up into Idaho includes providing a large number of complex miter gates for the lock and dam systems that allow barges to pass the dams on these rivers. We built big tainter gates for Folsom Dam in hydroleadermagazine.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF VIGOR.

Benton Strong: We’re active in both national and international markets and are headquartered in Portland, Oregon. We have shipyards in Swan Island in Portland; Seattle, Washington; and Ketchikan, Alaska, as well as two other fabrication facilities in the greater Portland region and satellite operations in other places, including Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. We have approximately 2,200 employees across all locations, about

Tainter gates from the Folsom Dam auxiliary spillway.

ADVERTISEMENT California and have provided gates and valves for lakes and power systems on the West Coast. We’ve also done some environmental work, such as producing fish screens.

Hydro Leader: Are many of those projects new-build construction, or are you doing a lot of retrofitting?

Brian Akin: Vigor is active on both new builds and retrofitting. On the new-build side, we constructed four new energy plants for American Municipal Power Ohio and produced replacement products for existing structures, such as Folsom Dam. The replacement of existing structures is about 70 percent of our business and new-build construction for hydro products is about 30 percent.

Hydro Leader: Has hydro been part of your company’s work from its beginning?

Brian Akin: Hydro was an area of work that helped Vigor and its predecessors build the business. The proximity and importance of the hydro dams in the Pacific Northwest had a big effect on that. The company cut its teeth on fish screens for dams, so hydro helped the company get its foothold within the steel fabrication market.

Hydro Leader: How has the design of fish screens evolved since that time?

Brian Akin: The concept design has not changed much from the original, but today we use much better components.

There is a revolving screen component similar to an almost-20‑foot-wide conveyor belt. The screens on those components have changed to put less stress on the fish and to use more mechanically sound equipment.

Hydro Leader: Do you manufacture trash racks?

Brian Akin: We have manufactured those in the past. They do need to be replaced often. They take a beating—a ton of debris from mudslides and fires comes down the river, and those trash racks keep it from going into the turbines.

Hydro Leader: What are your company’s other top concerns?

Brian Akin: When it comes to materials, no one is immune to the escalation of pricing related to supply constraints we’ve seen, which has been substantial for steel products and has also affected wood products, cars, and ships. Across the industry, steel prices have doubled since fall 2020. My big concern is that when we bid projects now, the pricing is coming in so far above the owner’s budget or the engineer’s estimate that they’re putting off the projects until the prices come back down or stabilize, which may not happen for a year or two.

The second issue is availability. Due to the COVID‑19 pandemic, a lot of the mills went down, and now, with hydroleadermagazine.com

demand going through the roof because of delayed projects, a lot of those mills still aren’t fully online or back to full capacity. The simple economics of demand versus supply mean that prices are at an all-time high and that there are longer lead times, which affect the schedules of new projects.

Hydro Leader: What is your vision for the future?

Brian Akin: As it relates to the complex fabrication side of our business, I think we’re going to continue to see growth within the fabrication industry related to aging infrastructure. We’re starting to see a tremendous number of opportunities from the Army Corps, Reclamation, other government entities, and private power companies. A number of them are recognizing that many of the structures built in the early 1900s are now at their maturity dates and need to be replaced before there is a failure.

Offshore wind is another big opportunity that we’re seeing coming up; there are projects in Oregon and California.

The current administration is supporting it tremendously.

People are reaching out to Vigor because of our facilities and our proximity to those job sites. Unlike on the East Coast, where offshore wind facilities are built on shallow shelves of land, West Coast installations require big, semisubmersible platforms to support them. Our facilities in Portland and Seattle are well positioned to support that new industry.

Benton Strong: We think a lot about the future of industrial jobs, and there are strong, family-wage jobs at Vigor. The maritime administration just released a report that pegged the average income in the shipbuilding and ship repair industry at $93,000 a year. It’s certainly higher in the places where we operate. These are really good jobs, and we see a future in which these jobs continue to be part of the economic foundation. Some of them will be in shipbuilding and repair, but a lot of them are going to be in the clean energy industries of the future, including hydro and wave energy. As a values-driven company, we believe both in creating and supporting those kinds of jobs for families around the country and in a future that relies on cleaner energy sources. H Brian Akin is the director of sales for infrastructure and energy at Vigor. He can be contacted at sales@vigor.net.

Benton Strong is the senior manager for public affairs at Vigor. He can be contacted at mediarelations@vigor.net.

September 2021 | HYDRO LEADER

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Lignum Vitae LLC: Growing Environmentally Safe Water-Lubricated Bearings From Trees

I

t may come as a surprise to learn that some of the best industrial bearings in the world are made not of space-age synthetic materials but of the wood of a tropical tree. Lignum vitae is a hard wood with a distinctive resin that makes excellent waterlubricated bearings. With increasing concerns about the pollution that can be caused by leaks in oil-lubricated bearings, waterlubricated bearings are becoming more popular. Bob Shortridge is the president of Lignum Vitae North America, LLC, which creates water-lubricated bearings for hydro and military applications around the world. In this interview, Mr. Shortridge tells us why he brought lignum vitae wood back into the marketplace, how he started his company, and about his business today.

Hydro Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your position.

I realized that lignum vitae was more than just wood and saw enormous potential in the modern hydroelectric marketplace. After being used extensively in hydro and marine applications for more than a century, it had been largely replaced by modern plastics and engineered composites. These materials, though, come with a number of expensive challenges for today’s hydro plants. Lignum vitae is self and water lubricated and offers decades of uninterrupted performance and improved environmental compliance while reducing ongoing maintenance costs, costly downtime, and fines. I started to promote lignum vitae as the environmentally friendly bearing and got the attention of hydro plants, many of which had been originally equipped with lignum vitae bearings, and some of which were looking for only their third bearing change since 1931. There is literally no other bearing available today that can offer 40–45 years of uninterrupted service before needing to change.

Hydro Leader: How does a lignum vitae bearing compare to a metal or oil-lubricated bearing?

Lignum vitae logs stored in Lignum Vitae North America’s warehouse.

28 | HYDRO LEADER | September 2021

Hydro Leader: Where does lignum vitae come from, and how rare is it?

Bob Shortridge: Initially, I was able to find lignum vitae at exotic wood yards around the United States and Europe. From these sources, I was able to launch the business with about 38 tons of material. It is indigenous to what the U.S. Department of Agriculture calls plant hardiness zone 13, which spans from Miami to Costa Rica.

Overharvesting during World War II led the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) to set clear guidelines for the sustainable harvest of lignum hydroleadermagazine.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF LIGNUM VITAE NORTH AMERICA.

Bob Shortridge: My background is in construction. For 35 years, I built highly engineered, heavy timber homes, buildings, and ski resorts anywhere heavy wind, snow, and seismic conditions called for structures that could withstand extreme conditions. My passion for engineering the indestructible led me to a lignum vitae auction at the Newport News shipyard. I bought 2½ tons of the wood and started researching its history and uses. I was surprised to learn that lignum vitae wood was used to fashion the first successful stern tube bearing for shipping when sailing vessels gave way to screw vessels. It was patented in hydro in 1882.

Bob Shortridge: It is difficult to do a direct comparison, because factors such as the machine’s balance and alignment and how the material is used have a big effect. The simplest explanation is that lignum vitae works using what is known as a mixed mode of lubrication. That means that it is both self lubricating and water lubricated. We’ve refurbished about 400–500 hydro plants since 2005 and have found that lignum vitae was used in two different ways: as long strips or tubes and as end-grained blocks. The end-grained blocks were the most effective because they took advantage of the material’s natural hardness and lubricity of its distinctive resin. The material can ride directly under the shaft under a pure load, or it can work hydrodynamically, becoming a wear-free component. When it's working hydrodynamically, there's a thin boundary of water between the shaft and the bearing. That’s why some of these bearings don’t wear for 40–45 years.

ADVERTISEMENT vitae. Like any valuable commodity, lignum vitae is at risk of exploitation, which is why we are in complete agreement and rigorous compliance with CITES’s harvesting, reforestation, and trade guidelines.

Hydro Leader: What does 38 tons of lignum vitae look like?

Bob Shortridge: Thirty-eight tons is about one small shipping container. To give you a sense of how far that goes, the refurbishment of an 80‑megawatt (MW) unit requires about a quarter ton, or 500 pounds, of material. We have a harvest permit that allows us to remove small quantities of material.

Almost any sawmill you’ve ever seen cuts more material before lunch than we harvest in a year. The resources are small, but we harvest them in a sustainable manner.

Hydro Leader: Do other companies use and sell lignum vitae?

Bob Shortridge: We have strategic partnerships all over the world and supply genuine lignum vitae material to them. There are a handful of other companies that claim to offer lignum vitae, but we are the only supplier with a commercially viable and sustainable inventory of genuine lignum vitae.

Hydro Leader: Does lignum vitae wear out or lose its resin?

Bob Shortridge: The resin never washes out; it’s not water soluble. It can only be broken down with acetone, alcohol, or another similar solvent. In fact, even in plants that have been down for 20–25 years, we’ve been able to clean the bearing and reuse it. If the wood dries out, it and the resin are still good. Nothing leaks from it, drains from it, or dries out from it. In fact, lignum vitae can operate both dry and wet.

Hydro Leader: Do you work internationally?

Bob Shortridge: In addition to the United States, we work in Canada, the Czech Republic, England, India, Kenya, Korea, Poland, Sweden, and Vietnam.

Hydro Leader: Would you say that interest in your product is growing in the U.S. market, or is there still a heavy preference for oil bearings?

Bob Shortridge: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations are changing, and so are the politics of renewable energy. Because of that, we’re seeing an uptick of interest in the United States, which is our largest hydro market. We are spinning in more than 10,000 MW in the United States. Canada accounts for about a third of our hydro. We also are engaged in conversations with one of the largest hydropower producers in the world, which is exploring the benefits of changing its fleet from oillubricated to water-lubricated bearings. hydroleadermagazine.com

Hydro Leader: What kind of service does your company provide?

Bob Shortridge: I built this company on finding solutions and bringing a creative problem-solving mindset to every customer we serve. We are proud of our unique ability to fulfill orders correctly and quickly. We know our customers’ names and their pain points. As a point of reference, we have twice delivered aircraft carrier bearings to India within 10 days of a purchase order.

Other examples of our services include machining and installing water-lubricated seals and bearings in new equipment and in older, more challenging turbines; reverse engineering existing bearings; and providing onsite training for bearing installation. We have a 13,000‑square-foot state-of-the-art production facility with full machining capabilities.

Hydro Leader: What are the company’s top concerns?

Bob Shortridge: When I worked in timber framing, we used heavy timbers, a lot of craftsmanship, and specialized equipment, but we found that we weren’t competing against other timber frames—we were competing against two-byfour construction, which was faster, cheaper, and easier. The same phenomenon is happening in the bearing industry: We compete with composites and plastics, which are extruded, cheap, and fast. In 16 years, I’ve only had two people in hydro tell me that longevity didn’t matter and that all they cared about was making the unit run so they could sell it. I seek out customers who take a longer view, and we find that those customers seek us out.

Hydro Leader: What is your company’s vision for the future?

Bob Shortridge: We’re focused on driving sustainability for the environment and for our customers’ businesses. What’s more sustainable than growing our components on a tree?

If all are to live in this world, we cannot keep polluting our waterways. We must seek a sustainable path forward; our goal is and will remain zero oil and zero pollution.

We were certified by NSF International as the number 1 environmentally safe bearing in the world, and we plan to keep that position. H

Bob Shortridge is the founder and president of Lignum Vitae North America, LLC. He can be reached at bshortridge@lignum-vitae.com or (804)372‑6206. For more on Lignum Vitae North America, visit www.lignumvitaesolutions.com.

September 2021 | HYDRO LEADER

| 29

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GE Renewable Energy: Teaching Future Generations About Hydropower

Matt Pevarnik speaks via Zoom during the opening presentation of the class.

G

eneral Electric (GE) is one of the largest corporations in the United States, with business lines ranging from power to aviation to healthcare. One of its business lines, GE Renewable Energy, is involved in a push to achieve a carbon-free grid by 2050. Some of GE Renewable Energy’s Denver-based employees have recently begun a school outreach program to educate young people about this important goal. In this interview, GE Renewable Energy Senior Sales Leader Matt Pevarnik tells us about the program he and his colleagues led at a Denver-area high school called STEM School Highlands Ranch and informs us about another outreach initiative, the Northwest Hydroelectric Association’s (NWHA) Ambassadors Program.

Hydro Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

32 | HYDRO LEADER | September 2021

Matt Pevarnik: The North America GE hydro leader encourages us to reach out and advocate in schools, and we did a program about 2 years ago at a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) school in North Carolina. However, the Highlands Ranch opportunity developed after we canceled our 2020 Christmas party due to COVID‑19 and decided to use the money to make a donation to some charities in Denver. The office that I work out of voted to donate to the Denver Rescue Mission, a nonprofit that supports the homeless, and to the Denverarea STEM School Highlands Ranch. We called STEM School to talk about how to make a direct deposit and then talked to the director about industry outreach. We explained how GE would like to get engaged and talk about the energy transition and hydro generation. After the director agreed, our team started a series of meetings with the team at Highlands Ranch.

We spent about 5 weeks putting the curriculum together.

By the end of February, we had put together a program for the 12th grade Advanced Placement environmental sciences group. We decided to focus on GE’s energy transitions initiative, which deals with how to get to a carbon-free grid. The GE hydro group and GE’s gas, hybrid, nuclear, and wind business units all put together presentations for the 6‑week course. We had a Zoom call with the students hydroleadermagazine.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF GE RENEWABLE ENERGY.

Matt Pevarnik: I’ve been in the power industry for 36 years.

I started in the fossil business after graduating from West Virginia University with a degree in civil engineering. I moved to Colorado 20 years ago to run the Alstom Power fossil power service division. After 10 years of running this division, I joined the Alstom global power sales organization, focusing on the entire power portfolio: coal, gas, oil, hydro, wind, solar thermal, and nuclear. Then, in 2015, I joined Alstom’s North America hydro division as a senior sales leader. The same year, GE acquired Alstom Power. In my current role for GE Hydro, I focus on customer development, opportunity lead, and strategic market analysis.

Hydro Leader: Please tell us about the Highlands Ranch school program.

ADVERTISEMENT every week in which a couple of the business units presented material on their particular areas of focus to show what we do. We wanted to give the students ideas about career development. We showed them how we’re investing in the transition to a carbon-free grid. We also had student breakout sessions after the 15‑minute presentations to facilitate discussions about the subject matter.

Hydro Leader: Did these calls occur during class time, or was it an extracurricular program?

Matt Pevarnik: The Zoom calls were during class time, and cameras were on. They started at 9:45 a.m. Mountain Time every Tuesday throughout March and into April. The classes usually ended at 10:45, but sometimes would go a little longer if the class discussion continued.

Hydro Leader: How did the students demonstrate what they learned?

Matt Pevarnik: There was a question-and-answer period during each presentation. When we got into the breakout groups, we had a chance to talk with the students, and they had a chance to ask questions about the technology or the presentation. At the end of the course, the students put together a presentation based on the material that we provided them. We had initially asked them how we could get to a carbon-free grid by 2030–2050, and they created a presentation to answer the question. The whole GE team was on that Zoom meeting, and we spent about 30 minutes going through the students’ slides about what they intended to do to be part of the future grid that we’re going to all be living in. It was a well-thought-out, educated presentation.

Hydro Leader: When you were presenting to the students about hydropower, were you focusing on how hydropower facilities work or on hydropower as an energy source and how it fits into the grid?

Matt Pevarnik: Both. I wanted to educate them on the makeup of hydropower here in the United States and on where hydropower facilities are located. Kids don’t often hear about this; they look at a light switch, and that’s the extent of their thinking about electricity. We gave the students an overview of hydropower here in Colorado, which only amounts to about 1–2 gigawatts (GW). In the Northwest, there are more river systems to take advantage of, and we talked about the install base of about 90 GW that exists there and about how hydropower is the largest and oldest form of renewable energy. We brought up what we’re doing to improve the operations of our installed base and to be environmentally conscious by paying attention to the oxygen levels in the water and making fish-friendly turbines. hydroleadermagazine.com

The opening presentation began with basic, scene-setting questions such as these.

Another major topic was pumped storage and how it enabled the nuclear business 40–50 years ago. Today, pumped storage can enable more renewable penetration. We started the class by painting a picture of a calm, winter night in Colorado. We wanted the students to start thinking about how if it’s nighttime, we’re not getting solar power, and if it’s calm, the wind turbine farm is not operating. Where’s our electricity going to come from? It’s a big problem that we’re trying to solve in the industry.

Hydro Leader: What topics were the students particularly interested in?

Matt Pevarnik: Their interest in nuclear energy surprised me, because nuclear sometimes has a bad reputation.

The students understood the issues surrounding nuclear waste. Perhaps because we led with a slide about how our electricity is going to have to come from somewhere, they asked a lot of questions about nuclear energy. Other generations might have been spooked by it, but they embraced it. Another thing that they understood was the intermittency of renewable sources like wind and solar. They also focused on batteries. It was interesting that when they talked about batteries, they talked about the waste and the mining associated with them. They really did their research for the class. The students were good at evaluating the pros and cons of different solutions.

Hydro Leader: Are there any changes you’re going to make to the curriculum based on what you learned from the first class?

Matt Pevarnik: We will be meeting with the Highlands Ranch school to talk about what worked and what didn’t.

We’re not educators, so we need to rely on the teachers for advice on how to approach the students. We first started talking about this program in January 2021 and decided to start a pilot in March. Each of my colleagues that I September 2021 | HYDRO LEADER

| 33

reached out to, including people in gas, hybrids, nuclear, and wind, jumped in. I do customer presentations all the time, so I simply took the presentations I usually do and geared them toward the students. Even though we put the pilot program together quickly, for the most part, we nailed it. I was happy with the pilot program. I base that on the students’ end presentation. Another thing we will try next time is to make it a bit more interactive. We can pause the slide and ask the students questions and get them more engaged instead of doing all the talking. We might also bring up options for careers in hydro that they may be interested in. There are so many careers in the field: electrical workers, engineers, environmentalists, geologists, and mechanics.

Hydro Leader: What is the motivation for the industry to get involved in programs like this?

Matt Pevarnik: We recognize as an industry that we need to get more involved in educating students. Teachers do a great job with reading, writing, and arithmetic, but we want to be able to come in to show the students future career options and explain important topics, like the energy transition, to them. We want to show the students the challenges that the industry is facing and is trying to solve.

We take part in the program for a couple of reasons.

We’re passionate about the business we’re in and about the energy transition. In addition, we want to make sure there’s a way we can help support the students and educate them on what the industry and we as a society are challenged with. If one of these students becomes a GE employee, that’s all the better for us.

Hydro Leader: Do you have plans to expand this program?

Matt Pevarnik: Yes. We would like to improve the curriculum we’ve put together and make it available for other GE business locations outside Colorado to use. We want to get the word out to other parts of the globe about what we’re doing here. We already have the material, so it’s just a matter of finding employees who can present it.

When we talk to our colleagues about this, there’s a lot of enthusiasm.

the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. As part of that, we developed the ambassador program that’s going to be launched this fall. It’s been in the works for about 2 years. The ambassador program involves getting NWHA members who are passionate about hydropower and education to become ambassadors and take those materials to their students or to their children’s or grandchildren’s classrooms, becoming the industry touch point for the classroom. The students can start to understand what their parents or grandparents do and the importance of hydropower to the area.

Sometimes hydropower has a negative reputation in the Northwest, so we have to make sure that children understand the importance of hydropower, why it’s an effective renewable energy source, and why it needs to be part of the future. We held our orientation program on July 29, and we’ll have a workshop in September to educate the ambassadors on the material, how to approach the students and school districts, and how to set up these programs. We hope to be able to stand up at our annual meeting in February 2022 and say that we have 10 ambassadors and have talked to over 200 students about the benefits of hydropower.

Hydro Leader: What age range are the ambassadors’ activities aimed at?

Matt Pevarnik: The materials we are using go from the kindergarten level to 12th grade. For kindergarteners, there is a six- or seven-page activity book about how hydroelectric power goes from the river to the hydro plant and then to the wires of your house. There is more sophisticated material for the middle schoolers and the high schoolers. The ambassadors can decide what age range to teach depending on the age of the children or grandchildren or other factors.

Hydro Leader: Are you going to be an ambassador?

Matt Pevarnik: I am. I’m going to try to expand my work from STEM School and do some teaching on hydropower in the Northwest. We don’t have much hydropower here in Colorado, but we’re going to look for opportunities. H

Hydro Leader: Please tell us about the NWHA’s ambassador program.

34 | HYDRO LEADER | September 2021

Matt Pevarnik is the senior sales leader for GE Hydro at GE Renewable Energy.

He can be contacted at matt.pevarnik@ge.com.

hydroleadermagazine.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF GE RENEWABLE ENERGY.

Matt Pevarnik: The NWHA started a communications committee about 2 years ago. The idea was for the committee to become the local voice for advocacy for and education on hydropower in classrooms, communities, and state capitals in the Northwest. We started to develop ideas for how to get into classrooms and take advantage of all the good material that has been developed by Bonneville Power Association and

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Leader ydro H

Does your organization have a job listing you would like to advertise in our pages? Hydro Leader provides this service to irrigation districts, water agencies, and hydropower facilities free of charge. For more information, please email Kris Polly at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com. acquisition, at nhidalgo@nwpipe.com, or go to www. nwpipe.com/careers.

TECHNICAL SALES AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT – ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY HYDRO TURBINES Location: Northwestern United States Deadline: Open until filled Salary: Based on qualifications RESPONSIBILITIES: +P resent NuSTREEM well by representing our product and our values accurately and enthusiastically. +M aintain existing lines of business relationships and effectively obtain new business. +B uild rapport and trust with both internal and external customers. +P rovide market feedback to help product development, marketing, and other strategies.

REQUIREMENTS: +2 + years of sales experience in the hydropower industry. +S trong technical understanding of mechanical and/or electrical products. +E xcellent written and verbal skills. +C omputer literate with Sales Force, Zoho or other CRM. For more information: go to https:// NuSTREEM.com or send your resume and cover letter to HR@NuSTREEM.com.

EHS LEAN SPECIALIST Location: St. George, UT Deadline: Open until filled Salary: Based on qualifications RESPONSIBILITIES: +T his new role will support the team by implementing and championing safety, lean, production, and environmental initiatives. +L ead safety program to ensure employee safety and compliance with OSHA standards.

REQUIREMENTS: + I ndustrial Safety or a technical discipline is desired. +M inimum 3 years business operations, plant engineering, or manufacturing experience, including 1–2 years of proven success with process improvement programs. +E xperience delivering OSHA-compliant safety programs in a manufacturing environment. +U nderstanding of welding concepts and liquid industrial coating applications. +C ertification in OSHA General Industry Outreach Trainer program; certification in lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, and 5S processes strongly preferred.

For more information: contact Nick Hidalgo, talent

38 | HYDRO LEADER | September 2021

REGIONAL SUPERVISOR - PLANT OPERATIONS Location: Adelanto, CA; Tracy, CA; and Portland, OR (travel 30%) Deadline: Open until filled Salary: Based on qualifications RESPONSIBILITIES: +D irects and coordinates activities concerned with manufacturing of company products by performing the essential job functions personally or through their subordinates.

REQUIREMENTS: +2 ‑year college or technical school; or 3–5 years related experience; or equivalent combination of education and experience. +P revious supervisory experience in a manufacturing environment required. +E xperience in a heavy-industrial manufacturing environment preferred.

For more information: contact Nick Hidalgo, talent acquisition at nhidalgo@nwpipe.com, or go to www.nwpipe.com/careers.

LEAN SPECIALIST COORDINATOR Location: Adelanto, CA Deadline: Open until filled Salary: Based on qualifications RESPONSIBILITIES: +L ead evaluation of production processes needing improvement and recommend solutions to management.

I+ m plement best practices and train affected personnel in their application. +D rive process improvement through statistical analysis and Lean toolbox.

REQUIREMENTS: +B achelor’s degree in engineering or a technical discipline desired. +M inimum 3 years business operations, plant engineering or manufacturing experience to include 1–2 years of process improvement program proven success. +U nderstanding of welding concepts and liquid industrial coating applications. +C ertification in lean manufacturing processes strongly preferred.

For more information: contact Nick Hidalgo, talent acquisition at nhidalgo@nwpipe.com, hydroleadermagazine.com

JOB LISTINGS +Q uantify risk and rewards to prioritize commercial

activity and drive sales LABOR COATING TECHNICIAN Location: Atlanta, GA, and Denver, CO Deadline: Open until filled Salary: Based on qualifications RESPONSIBILITIES: +S urface Preparation of the area in which epoxy will be applied; perform functions of a laborer as required.; sandblast to remove debris from metal; operate electric and hand tools; operate a high-PSI pressure washer and spray gun.

REQUIREMENTS: +M ust be willing to travel in and out of state when needed. +M ust feel comfortable working in a confined space for long periods; must be able to stand for long periods. +W illing to complete a field training in Massachusetts. +A ble to complete a confined space training (provided

by A&W); able to complete OSHA 10 and other safety training (provided by A&W); able to travel to Massachusetts for ongoing field training.

For more information: For Atlanta-based position, contact Cherry L. Martinez, senior recruiter, at (407) 287‑8790 or cmartinez@garney.com For Denver-based position, contact Ariana Craft, recruiter, at (407) 287‑8808 or abehler@ garney.com.

+T ranslate business problems into advanced analytics and

research projects +P roactively manage customer and partner deliverables to

ensure excellence and consistency +O wn detailed financial modeling and market research

for economic determinations such as cost of energy, breakeven, and project IR +A nalyze and evaluate data, creating innovative advanced analytics and data visualizations REQUIREMENTS: +B BA/BA/BS in business, finance, accounting, or engineering + I nvolvement in developing creative research and analysis program + I ntermediate proficiency with Excel and PowerPoint for financial modeling and presentations +E xcellent written, analytical, and organizational skills, including the proven ability to manage multiple projects +A bility to travel up 25% For more information: go to https://emrgy.com/careers/ or send cover letter and resume to HR@emergy.com

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PROJECT ENGINEER Location: Denver, CO Deadline: Open until filled Salary: Based on qualifications RESPONSIBILITIES: +N egotiate and purchase materials +C reate submittals, RFIs, and change orders +C oordinate projects from start to finish: assist with estimating; project setup & closeout; support field operations; maintain detailed job costs +A ssist in scheduling projects and crews +B e willing to fill in on crew when needed REQUIREMENTS: +D egree in civil engineering, construction management, or other related field +0 –3 years experience +L ocated in or willing to relocate to the Denver area +M ust be willing to travel 1–4 weeks at a time to support projects.

For more information: contact Josh Snow at jsnow@garney.com

SALES ENGINEER Location: Atlanta, GA Deadline: Open until filled Salary: Based on qualifications

RESPONSIBILITIES: +R eview customer water resource data to determine the

most valuable project scope (turbine and array sizing). +C reate and manage sales tools for developing

system solutions and value optimization. +C reate customer proposals and presentations

demonstrating the benefits, value and financial payback. +U se financial modeling tools to calculate cost

of energy, payback period and project IRR +M eet with clients, as part of the sales team, for sales

presentations, and to develop customer offering. +P rovide timely response to customer technical

requests during the sales process. +A cquire new customers by winning them over from

competitors and discovering new opportunities . +M anage their own book of sales opportunities

developing from origination to order.

REQUIREMENTS: +B S degree in engineering, preferred background

in electrical, mechanical, or systems .

+N egotiation and problem-solving skills,

RENEWABLE ENERGY ANALYST Location: Atlanta, GA Deadline: Open until filled Salary: $70,000 – $95,000 RESPONSIBILITIES: +E xecute analytical, strategic, and financial assessments for business case development +G ather customer/market information and offer recommendations to answer key business questions

+P roficiency with Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. +E xperience in energy, particularly

and data analysis/modeling.

hydroleadermagazine.com

renewable energy, preferred. +A bility to travel up 50%.

For more information: go to https://emrgy. com/career/ or contact hr@emrgy.com

September 2021 | HYDRO LEADER

| 39

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