Jeff's father takes a trip to Ohio every December, and this year Jeff and I went with him. We spent a couple of days in Cincinnati with Jeff's aunt, then drove down to rural Kentucky for a few days with his uncle's family, then back to the city for the last couple of days.
Jeff's aunt (not his father's sister but the one married to his uncle) is involved in a documentary of a small hydroelectric station, called the Mother Ann Lee because it is located on old Shaker land. It's an old station, very small and out-of-date, and to boot it can only be accessed by water or by a narrow trail. For all these reasons, the power company wanted to get rid of it; it just wasn't worth it for them. Enter a small band of crazy engineers who are restoring and modernizing the station in order to get it back on line and providing power again.
It's not a large station (I think I was told it could power 2,000 homes), but every little bit counts. Kentucky is a coal-heavy region; this plant is the only one in the area that can provide clean-energy credits. For these local-energy activists, the idea is to put small, distributed, green
power stations all over, so that there is less dependence on huge monolithic plants.
(I put green
in quotation marks because there are many arguments on all sides about what actually constitutes green energy and what is the most environmentally friendly ... but I don't want to get into that here.)
So Jeff's aunt asked us if we would be interested in seeing the Mother Ann Lee, and of course we were. She led us along the base of a cliff, above a steep hill that led directly into the river. We had to step carefully on the damp leaves, but we didn't fall.
