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I'm sorry if my comment appears too "middlebrow dismissal". My dayjob is working as a fluid mechanics researcher, and I have colleagues who work on hydropower t

I'm sorry if my comment appears too "middlebrow dismissal". My dayjob is working as a fluid mechanics researcher, and I have colleagues who work on hydropower turbine design. And I did watch the video, hence my comments about viscous losses. My point being that I know turbine design is an extremely well-understood and mature field, I didn't just google it. Also, as you say they've built a prototype to test the result. To be taken seriously, they should have also put a few students on the task of building a similarly sized Kaplan turbine and then compared the efficiency. It would have been very simple; there are probably even scale model Kaplan turbines that you can buy for this purpose. (It's basically just a propeller in a tube.) TFA is a bit like an SW dev coding up a new webserver, claiming it solves a case where existing ones do poorly, but then not bothering to benchmark it on that case against, say, Apache or Nginx. Finally, the big challenges in hydropower are not in increasing efficiency or lowering cost. The challenges are that we've interrupted/dammed most large rivers already, and any new plans to build hydropower face great resistance both from NIMBYs and environmental protection groups.

reneherse 10y ago
>Finally, the big challenges in hydropower are not in increasing efficiency or lowering cost. The challenges are that we've interrupted/dammed most large rivers already, and any new plans to build hydropower face great resistance both from NIMBYs and environmental protection groups. That's what makes this new turbine such a brilliant fit for our times: it can work at a small, distributed scale that to my knowledge hasn't been possible with hydro before, and at significantly reduced capital costs. Additionally, there are hardly any moving parts. Of the pieces that are required, they are intrinsically durable and easy to manufacture shapes, suitable for manufacture in relatively low-tech economies. BTW, thanks for clarifying your initial response.
nate_meurer 10y ago
This is exactly the sort of comment that keeps me coming back to hacker news. Thank you for it.

reneherse 10y ago

>Finally, the big challenges in hydropower are not in increasing efficiency or lowering cost. The challenges are that we've interrupted/dammed most large rivers already, and any new plans to build hydropower face great resistance both from NIMBYs and environmental protection groups. That's what makes this new turbine such a brilliant fit for our times: it can work at a small, distributed scale that to my knowledge hasn't been possible with hydro before, and at significantly reduced capital costs. Additionally, there are hardly any moving parts. Of the pieces that are required, they are intrinsically durable and easy to manufacture shapes, suitable for manufacture in relatively low-tech economies. BTW, thanks for clarifying your initial response.

nate_meurer 10y ago

This is exactly the sort of comment that keeps me coming back to hacker news. Thank you for it.