Oswegatchie Hydro Redevelopment Project
Reliant Energy
Liverpool, New York
Reliant Energy’s Erie Boulevard Hydropower, L.P. completed a major upgrade of its
Oswegatchie Power Plant, located on the Oswegatchie River in St. Lawrence County, New York. The hydropower plant, built in
1913, originally consisted of a wooden power house and a wooden flume. It had been out of service since 1992 when a flume
wall collapsed. The $3.3 million upgrade boosts the rated capacity of the plant to 2 megawatts (MW). By comparison, the
original plant had a capacity of only 0.8 MW.
The upgrade consisted of demolishing the original structures, constructing a new intake with fish-friendly trashracks, installing two 6 1/2-foot-diameter penstocks, and constructing a new powerhouse with two hydro turbines and two generators. Erie Boulevard Hydropower filed its license amendment application on June 29, 2001. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued an order amending the license on Sept. 17, 2001, and construction began subsequently. The project needed to be operational 14 months after the submittal of the Application for License Amendment to the FERC. Cooperation among the project participants and stakeholders was critical to achieving this goal. The implementation of certain innovative approaches in the permitting, design, bidding and construction of the project were necessary to meet this challenge.
There were a number of conventional project approaches that could have been applied. Reliant and Kleinschmidt
evaluated the alternatives and determined that a fast-track project approach would be best suited to accomplishing the
objective of completing the design, bidding and construction of the project within the scheduled time frame. The entire
process was reviewed to determine where time savings could be achieved without compromising quality or increasing the cost
of the project. All of the project participants worked together to see the project to a successful completion within the
project schedule.
For more information contact Paul Williams, P.E.