A few weeks passed before going back up to the site to put a deposit down. While we don't know what we were doing, we were trying to do as much due diligence as possible. Aside from the terrible French Canadian Hydrolec turbine there were other issues, they turned out to much more political that thought at the time. The main issue being, who will buy the power... Austin, my dad, and myself are extremely compitent in our mechanical abilities, but lack the extreme political finesse. This however is one of the main reasons I chose to go to businness school, aside from being bad at math :) I cant stress how important soft skills are, and this venture could easily be killed with one bad handshake.
Knowing that the PPA or "Power Purchasing Agreement" was the most important thing for this venture, we planned up to about plan E, but plan A was to convince the town to buy our power or let us "wheel" the power through their transmission lines around the corner to the Eversouce grid. The only way you can do things in rural communites is go in person, shake hands and talk. So as you can see in the picture Austin, Dane, and myself went up to Ashland to preach the word of hydro to the townspeople. We were praying for a good reception of us turning the site back on that has been off since 2019 where there was drama with the town municipal power company, but that has been sorted out now, and are now working with the town on a Wheeling contract. We had a powerpoint all ready to go, and printed copies of the power point to pass out to the board, we were prepared.
You can see in this picture it was a well attended meeting. The previous owner when he bought the property went to one of these meetings to do what we did, and he was met with tension and friction, but you see he didnt put his name on the docket little did he know. Since all of our i and t's were done we were very well recieved, oddly. There is a young woman on the selectboard who happens to work for a power company in the area, and she was very enthusiastic about our project. The meeting ended after we listened to an hour of town gossip and proceeded to leave when the unthinkable happened.
We were met with a flurry of FOG's "Fu$*#@ Old Guys" One was the electrical guy for the town, one was the building inspector, and the last guy was bald santa on the right. They were all interested in helping us in whatever way they could, but bald santa had more to offer.... There was also a very interested woman who wanted to know what our plans were, so we invited them across the street to the common man restaurant for beers and snacks. Boy we were not ready for santa's presents. It turns out the guy's father started the site in 1985 and has been on every board appointment for the town, and knows about all the skeletons. He with his father ran the site for about 20 years. So for the next three hours we were given all the gossip.
Now that the deposit was given, it was time to check out the goods. My father Austin, and I drove up to the previous owners property where all the turbine stuff was stored. You have to understand that hydro is a very very old insutry, and these sites have a extremely long lifetime. When you have a rare no longer made turbine you hoard as many parts as you can, because when something breaks, not if, its good to have spares. Even if the spares are rusty POS, its better than making it from scratch. At some point in time there were threeish more units available up in Maine and were gotten as spares for the site.
What seems like a large pile of rusty crap you would indeed be right beacuse thats what it is, but its our large pile of rusty heavy crap. Here you can see runners, and an extra 52'' butterfly valve among other penstock peices. What an exciting prospect.
Luckily the glorious pile of good shit, is in much better condition than the stuff in the woods. This is the stuff was active in 2019 and pulled in "working" order and could be "put back together by a couple smart people in a few weeks." Mhmm sure...
Here are extra sets of main bearing assemblies. Inside lives two 205mm tapered roller bearings preloaded to some unknonw amount. Oh did I mention there is no manual documents or anything for this turbine? No? All we have by the grace of Posideon is the French River site where they go really in depth with taking apart and putting back together this beast. Here is a link to the Dissasembly, and the Reassembly. The amount of work done was mind bending, and a god-like effort. The Needle roller bearings were worn out so they make new rollers with the same size dowel pins, thats how much effort they put in.
Here is the culprit of the failures in the past. This splined shaft in the picture is a intermediate shaft in-between the planetary 5:1 gearbox and the 100hp generator. This is the Sun side you are looking at, and you can see the spray weld repair done that has not been machined yet. i won't go into the fix just yet but apparently this is the smoking gun of many failures.
This is a spare 100hp motor that we were able to look at but not able to verify at the time if this one was any good. You can see the coupler on it, and thats where one end of the intermediate shaft lives.
After taking a very poor inventory and seeing the shape of everything we wanted better measurements of the generator room, so back to the site.
I finally found a picture of the hole in the floor with the ancient stairway, anyways back to the story!
Did I also mention the dam came with an old man as part of the package? Buy a dam, get an old man for free! His name is Jerry, and he has been looking after the dam for 15-20 years as the operator and checks in on things. He drives a Ford Ranger and wears a leather cowboy hat, what more do you need to know? He is a 80 year old veteran who would rather die than go to a home, and he loves the dam because it gives him some purpose. He calls us randomly and tells us something that we should do or some tidbit of information.
In order to see what future turbines could fit inside the space, Austin and I went around with a tape measure and measured everything so we could build a cad model of what we have.
While we were down there I took a video of the undermining that has been happening underneath that concrete area Austin is standing on. You can see that theres water trickling down a ancient wooden post that was covered with concrete, lets just not pay attention to that. In the future we will be pouring more concrete in there to make things nice and prevent a new basement from forming.
We went out to lunch after this and discussed many things and handed a deposit to the owner. Now its time to form the LLC, fund the LLC, find a lawyer, write checks, and deal with the multitude of bureaucrats to get things transferred and property in the LLC