Bear Swamp Power Company: Friday June 19th, at 5:00 pm

FERC #2669. What? There's a lot behind this sign. Stay tuned as we try to unravel the story of the Bear Swamp Power Company.

The Bear Swamp Power station and reservoir was built in the 70's. Someone had an idea; and eventually it was realized.

A reservoir; or what formerly was a swamp sits on top of a mountain - about 1800 feet in elevation, adjacent to the Deerfield River. Due to rainfalls, it has 30 feet of "head" or overflow of the bowl -as it were. If I could drain the reservoir and have it run through a couple of turbines, then I could generate megawatts to help augment and offset peak load times on the electrical grid. Good idea.

In the early seventies; the idea was engineered and the swamp became a reservoir; the mountain was bored out to accommodate a shaft and power station and any residual run off would be dumped into the Deerfield river - plus - rather than waiting for the rain to fill up the bowl, the pumps would deliver water up to the reservoir to cycle the turbines.

"Who made the turbines and the pumps?" I asked Charlie, the visitor center currator with the grand sense of humor.

"Toshiba and Hitachi made most of the equipment in the power house. The turbine impeller blades were trucked up the mountain very carefully after hours shutting down the highways; they were 28 feet wide, I'm told." said Charlie.

"Japanese parts and engineering,..how's that?" I asked again.

"The Japanese had retooled after the War - after the devastation and with the help of the Marshall Plan, they reinvented their own power grid and electrical sources. They were newly engineered power generators, unlike the US infrastructure that had various power sources all supplying the national grid - many of them 40 years old. So the Japanese had state of the art equipment which made it attractive to the power company engineers. The turbines are kind of a direct drive to the generators and can reverse direction to actually pump water back up the mountain,...pretty ingenious."



If you click on the picture and look at the center near the horizon, you can see the reservoir. I asked Charlie if I could get a closer look at the power generation system. He didn't say yes,...but he didn't say no (it's inside the mountain).



According to Charlie, it's been bought and sold a dozen times - like a trading card for investment groups - even Enron held title once (that tells you something about this industry) - it's current owner resides in Maine. Charlie noted that there's a full time staff in the power generation station consisting of two people. The controls are maintained by a remote office in Marlboro, Mass; it can be monitored and activated off a laptop.

It's not 100% self sustaining; it borrows power to activate the pumps to fill up the reservoir. It functions as a reserve electrical supplier when demand loads intensify. There is talk about installing more efficient pumps; perhaps there's a new discussion of setting up windpower to power the pumps - that would make it 100% self sustaining.