Old technology isn't just water over
the dam
Springfield Republican, Wednesday, December
29, 2004
By BOB DATZ
rdatz@repub.com
It's been "Back to
the Future" for William K. Fay and Swift River Co. for more than 25 years.
Were his hair
ghost-white, the 50-year-old Palmer resident could leap into the role of Doc
Brown in that 1980s film trilogy about time travel - as long as the subject
is generating electricity using water power.
With a Wilbraham
machine shop that matches Doc Brown's lab for its productive clutter, Swift
River can both engineer and produce parts for the rehabilitation of aging
hydropower dams that dot the region's mill landscape. "This stuff has been
underwater for 75 or 80 years," the quick-speaking company president
enthused with the attendant arm thrusts of Christopher Lloyd's movie
inventor, "and the problem is, how do you take something out that's just a
big lump of rust?"
Why bother? The
answer to Fay is as obvious as an electric bill, as intrusive as instability
in the Middle East: "We're offering a clean alternative to fossil fuels, and
it's there forever."
The "we" includes Fay
and his partners bringing their offspring into their niche within the power
grid, a company founded in 1981 by economist and alternative energy pioneer
Peter B. Clark of Hamilton. Onetime employees and now partners Fay and Ken
Smith of North
Brookfield have
grown children working in this 12-person staff, which operates dams from
here to Sebec, Maine.
The company also
repairs and maintains dams owned by other
New England
mill owners and power companies. Besides Clark, the remaining partner is W.
Davis Hobbs of the
Turners
Falls section of Montague (click for background on
D. Hobbs Contracting, Inc., then click "back" to
return).
They are as likely as
not to arrive in sweatshirt and jeans to the former Collins Paper mill
complex off
Cottage Street,
where they own a small hydroelectric dam and have carved out an office that
looks as lived-in as the machine shop.
From top to bottom,
tasks run a gamut. Fay, a spectacled mechanical engineer, had dark,
workmanlike crevasses running through his palms, screaming of machine work -
first thing on a recent Monday morning. At other times, he's designing some
workarounds or dickering with wildlife officials about how to protect fish
species living or spawning near dams - a major obstacle to hydropower
development.
.jpg)
Ken Smith giving his son Ian and
Fay's daughter Celeste and son Will a rigging lesson
On the other end of
the organization, 18-year-old Ian Smith (son of Kenneth, partner and general
manager) is absorbing carpentry, electrical work and machinist training from
shop manager Warren Fay of Springfield, William Fay's brother. The younger
Smith, six months out of North Brookfield High School, has plans to learn
technology more formally. But he is happy to describe how he helped hoist a
50-foot power shaft from the mill's cellar to recondition a used,
60-foot
lathe. (Click to see
photos of shaft project).
"It's a little bit of
everything," he said of his work. "It's always something new every day."
Something old as
well. Fay said many of the half-dozen company-owned dams date from 1918 and,
like the Red Sox, were due to move to more productive levels. The company is
working with a Massachusetts Technology Collaborative "green power" grant to
upgrade its power production from the company's Pepperell dam to 1.9
megawatts. At 3.5 megawatts, Woronoco dam in Russell is the largest
Swift
River
property, although that is a fraction of a major power plant's capacity.
Nationally, hydro accounts for about 10 percent of energy production,
according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, whereas in the 1930s
it produced one-third.
But Fay said there
are thousands of dams in
New England
in various states of disrepair. He has been driven like a turbine by this
specialty since going to work for Ware River Power Co. in Barre out of
college. He pointed to several advantages should a 40-megawatt potential of
the Connecticut
River dam at
Windsor Locks be developed.
"It would stabilize
the river (level) and bring back the waterfront in Springfield," Fay said.
"God knows Springfield needs some rejuvenation." And with the Yankee Rowe
nuclear plant weighing in at 60 megawatts, he added, "you're talking about a
nuclear power plant with free flow and no pollution."
The state's Wetlands
Protection Act has made new dam construction a virtual impossibility in
recent years, so as
Swift
River looks to the future of hydropower, Fay describes his longtime
colleagues and working family members in the same way as the old dams his
company works to develop: "We all have links to the past."
Copyright 2004
MassLive.com. All Rights Reserved.
|
