Opinion Editorial: City could generate its own electricity

Originally published by the Leavenworth Times on April 5, 2011
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Editorial by Matt Nowak

Leavenworth, Kan. — The City of Leavenworth is so fortunate to sit on the edge of the Missouri River and on the edge that is fairly deep because of the river channel.

If it had underwater turbines that were designed to work for that location, the city could be generating electricity for itself.

I am familiar with at least two possible ways to put turbines in the river based on communications with a company that builds them.  One method is to place pylons in the river bed.  They are placed in an array that allows multiple generators to be placed on the pylons like putting a glove over a hand.



The company demonstrated via the web how it can maintain the generators by piloting a maintenance barge over the arrays, lifting the generators up onto the deck and immediately replacing them with new generators as it repairs the ones just removed on the deck of the barge.

Using this method, they can regularly replace and maintain numerous arrays of generators on a large river like the Mississippi River, for example, while having very little down time.

Another method is to suspend a generator from the bottom of a barge-like vessel that would remain in place, but it would allow the generators to rise and fall with the level of the river.  In other words, a barge with a generator could be tied to the Leavenworth edge of the river above the channel and could be generating electricity.  An enormous advantage over coal-fired or wind-powered generation is that the electricity would be generated very near where it would be used and would not need extensive transmission lines.


Obviously, this system would work best for cities located on the very edge of a major river with enough depth to allow the suspension of the generators from below a barge or enough constant depth to allow the deployment of a permanent array mounted on pylons in the bed of the river.

But, oops, navigation on the Missouri takes precedence over all other uses and cancels out any good ideas that might benefit Leavenworth.  Former North Dakota Senator Dorgan created a five-year, $25 million river study called the Missouri River Authorized Purposes Study (MRAPS) in 2009 (Public Law 111-8).

The study is to review all eight authorized uses of the river including flood control, water supply, navigation, water quality, irrigation, fish & wildlife, hydropower, and recreation.  Oops again.  Representative Leutkemeyer of Missouri recently introduced an amendment, adopted by the House, that prohibits the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from proceeding with the study even though at least one year and $5 million have already been spent on it.

Missouri is apparently so concerned about the potential affects of the Corps’ study that it would rather kill the study than allow the truth to be discovered.  South Dakota Senator Tim Johnson is attempting to reverse the House amendment so that the study can continue because the upriver states all realize that there are practically no real benefits from navigation to them and navigation holds back any developments that they could be making with respect to hydropower, fish & wildlife, and recreation.

In my opinion, any Missouri City that sits on the river above Jefferson City and any Kansas city on the river has good reason to join with those other upriver states to see that the Corps’ MRAPS study is allowed to continue.  The budget has to be approved by April 8, so there is very little time to contact your federal legislators to insist that they kill the amendment to allow funding of MRAPS.

We can only blame ourselves for inaction if one Missouri Representative can stop a very important study on the authorized uses of the Missouri River which may deny cities like Leavenworth from benefiting from hydropower generation.

Matt Nowak lives in Lansing and works as a natural resources manager.