Hydroelectric

HYDROVISION attendees visit Carter Lake, Estes Park Hydro plants

Dozens of attendees received a taste of Colorado’s hydropower scene in one of the show’s popular technical tours.
HYDROVISION attendees visit Carter Lake, Estes Park Hydro plants
(Dozens of HYDROVISION attendees in front of Carter Lake as part of Monday's technical tour. Photo by Clarion Energy.)

The Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District (Northern Water) wasn’t originally in the power business. However, that changed when the federal government created the Lease of Power Privilege program in the early-2000s, allowing more hydropower projects to be built near its reservoirs.

From there, the 2.6 MW Robert V. Trout hydropower plant was born, coming online in 2012. Dozens of HYDROVISION International attendees on Monday toured the facility, which is located at Carter Lake, a reservoir of about 110,000 acre-feet of water.

Attendees line up outside the Robert V. Trout Hydropower Plant. Photo by Clarion Energy.

The run-of-river plant, which consists of two Francis turbine-generator units, delivers raw water to local treatment plants and generates some electricity along the way.

“Right now, as you might imagine, we are delivering a lot of water to hot, hot cities,” said Jeff Stahla, Public Information Officer for Northern Water.

The Robert V. Trout facility is part of the Colorado-Big Thompson project, with six original hydropower plants owned by the Bureau of Reclamation and two added more recently by Northern Water. The project spreads over 250 miles and stores, regulates and diverts water from the Colorado River on the western slope of the Continental Divide to the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains.  

While the plant itself isn’t huge, Stahla told tour attendees the surrounding area has grown immensely.

“Because of the amount of growth in northern Colorado, it runs quite a bit,” he said.

In the afternoon, tour attendees visited a larger hydropower plant. The 45 MW Estes plant, operated by the Bureau of Reclamation, is also part of the Colorado-Big Thompson project. The three-unit plant is remotely operated from Wyoming.

Estes began operating in 1950 with a single Francis turbine-generator unit and takes diversion water delivered from the Marys Lake Power Plant and holds it in Lake Estes for the project.

Lake Estes is formed by Olympus Dam. Reclamation said the afterbay storage in Lake Estes and the forebay storage in Marys Lake enable the Estes powerplant to meet daily variations in energy demand. 

Attendees pose outside the Estes Power Plant. Photo by Clarion Energy.

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