THE INNOVATORS
ADVERTISEMENT
NuSTREEM: Bringing Aerospace Ingenuity to the Hydropower Industry
A NuSTREEM turbine.
N
uSTREEM is a hydropower company whose modular small hydro units use tested, patented intelligence to optimize performance, leading to proven, measurable efficiency gains. With thousands of hours of run time on six preproduction units, NuSTREEM is now launching a pilot program for its NuTECH Controller and is seeking to install more of its units. In this interview, NuSTREEM General Manager Juliann Blanford tells Hydro Leader about what makes NuSTREEM’s technology novel and what the company can offer to hydropower owners and operators. Hydro Leader: Please tell us about your background and history of your company, NuSTREEM.
34 | HYDRO LEADER | September 2020
Hydro Leader: How many folks work at NuSTREEM? Juliann Blanford: Ten of the best people I know. As needed, we also access people with specialized manufacturing and engineering excellence through our sister companies and on-call consultants. Hydro Leader: Is NuSTREEM an American company? Juliann Blanford: Our company is registered in Connecticut, everyone who works here is American, all our manufacturing is done in the United States, and all our suppliers are in the United States. We do ultimately roll up to a British private equity company, but all that is in the background and doesn’t really affect what our customers need. Hydro Leader: What is the range of your turbines, and are they all essentially the same size? Juliann Blanford: Our family of turbines ranges from 8 to 40 feet of head, and each one is designed for 85 cubic feet per second of water. Broadly speaking, we determine the model of turbine a customer needs based on the amount of head, and we determine the number of turbines they need based on the site flow. With our standard and modular approach, each of the models in our family of turbines is built with a tried and true turbine design. Our family of turbines can fit generators of 75, 100, 150, 175, 200, and 250 kilowatts, all in the same physical envelope, which is approximately 9 feet by 9 feet hydroleadermagazine.com
PHOTOS COURTESY OF NUSTREEM.
Juliann Blanford: My background is in finance. I came to NuSTREEM as the financial controller of our sister company, Froude, which makes high-performance dynamometers in Detroit and the UK. I started with NuSTREEM in 2018 and have been in love with the hydro industry ever since. The history of our company starts with our founders, who all came from a custom machine-design company, Windham Automated Machines (WAM), which was staffed with brilliant engineers from the aerospace industry. Custom machine companies are in the business of improving a company’s operations by designing machines to automate processes. WAM bought a mill to house its office and manufacturing space. The mill used to be powered by hydropower, but the site had long been decommissioned. The company went to the market and solicited proposals for hydro turbines, but it did not like the approaches that were on offer. In response, it founded NuSTREEM (formerly known as HydroDynamic Energy) and spent the next 10 years designing and proving the reliability of a modular approach to a standard-
designed family of low-head, high-flow turbines based on a dual-regulated Kaplan turbine.
