However, these systems cannot harvest hydro energy from small sources of water with low head and low discharge, such as streams and creeks.
While MES already exists in the form of high altitude pumped storage hydro-electric complexes, these cannot easily be increased in numbers to meet future grid needs, because they are strictly limited by geology and geography, with the best sites largely commandeered.
Previous numerical simulations of the hydro-dynamic response in the various bioreactor designs were mostly concentrated on the local flow field analysis using computational fluid dynamics, which cannot provide the global hydro-dynamics information to assist the bioreactor design.
"Our prime minister said two years ago that we cannot afford to depend on hydro - but now we're going to buy hydroelectricity from Ethiopia, which is even drier than Kenya," she says.
This technology enables the removal of trace amounts of sulfur which cannot be removed by a conventional hydro-desulfurization method.
The results indicate that mechanical compaction and burial depth cannot explain the differences in the hydro-mechanical behavior of the tested materials.
The above explanation is essential, because if in any of the proposed cases the water is spilled, the total hydro energy would not be equal, therefore the cases cannot be compared.
Electricity, almost uniquely among commodities, cannot be stored efficiently (except as water in hydro-electric dams).
In particular, induction generators cannot support the system voltage during faults, unlike steam or hydro turbine-driven synchronous generators.
But Blake and other micro-hydro developers in rural Wales and the west country say they cannot expand in many areas because large wind and solar companies have taken all the capacity on the grid and [the regulator] Ofgem's rules state that private operators rather than the public money must pay for any upgrade.
