I will just reply to these points you made.
I notice you don't seem to have a good handle on what a 200 KW generator would cost.
actually if you buy a generator head only its not that expensive , especially if you buy if from our product producers in china.
http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/8kw-to-200kw-Brushless-ac-generator_563624432.html1,100.00 from Alibaba , convert that 200 kw into 24/7 grid electricity @ .07 kwh and it pays for itself in a month and you have apx 9,000 to put in the bank.
Very true, but that is all the head pressure you have and that won't drive much of a generator unless you have a huge volume of water flowing through it.
the turbine that is being acted upon by a fluid / water does not care about head pressure , it feels the pressure of the water / fluid that is moving in the pipe / penstock ...
the momentum of all of the moving water / fluid is what turns a turbine.
but the extreme restriction would reduce the flow to such a low velocity that you wouldn't be able to get any appreciable power out of it.
if the designer of the system has designed the system to fail then it will most likely fail.
if hes good enough...
think about this , water supply pipes are around 10 ft to 20 ft in diameter , you would need to really work at stopping that flow once it had started moving , and if you tried to stop it at the end of the pipe all the momentum of the moving water would most likely explode the pipe at the end.
a 100 mile long pipe @ 10 ft diameter with water flowing inside it at a velocity of only 1 ft per second would
cause a pressure of 228,729 psi at the stopping end were you to suddenly stop the flow of water somehow.
there would be 2.5 billion pounds of water in the pipe traveling at 1 ft per second , thats 2.5 billion ft pounds / sec !!!
I seriously doubt that is what he said.
he actually said that water would not flow at all if the pipe was long enough , even if the pipe was not capped at all .. that is when I calculated that getting opinions from people who were really good at physics was a waste of time.
