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ning water through two turbines.
• Missouri River Energy Services, a Sioux Falls, S.D.-based not-for-profit utility that provides power to 61 cities, has the license to build the power plant at an estimated cost of $260 million.
• When complete, the 34-megawatt facility will be able to support as many as 18,000 homes for a year, said company spokesman Bill Radio. It could crank out up to 55 megawatts at times when the river is running full.
• Missouri River Energy is considering three other hydroelectric projects at existing dams -- one on the Des Moines River north of Des Moines and two others on the Mississippi River at Dubuque and Davenport.
• Electricity suppliers prefer hydropower because it is much easier to ramp up or down based on customer demand than natural gas-powered plants, and it is much more reliable on a daily basis than wind or solar power.
• The proposed developments also benefit from worries about the environmental risks of coal power and safety fears surrounding nuclear energy.
• "I do think we're going to see more of this," Radio said, citing the difficulty of building coal or nuclear facilities. "You take two really big pieces of future generation out of the mix right now, and what that leaves is natural gas, hydro and other renewables."
• While hydroelectric plants cost more to build than those that run on natural gas or wind power, they require little maintenance for decades and the fuel is free.
• Hydroelectricity got a boost in 2005, when Congress approved a tax credit for hydropower that was already in place for other sources of renewable energy, including wind and solar.
• President Barack Obama signed two bills last month designed to spark more interest in hydropower. One directs the FERC to consider adopting a two-year licensing process at existing non-powered dams. The second authorizes quicker action on proposals for small hydro projects at dams owned by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
• Interest in hydropower had been low because of the high cost of construction and a protracted government permit process requiring extensive environmental studies and mounds of paperwork. That left projects mired in bureaucracy for as much as eight years before construction could begin.
• "If you keep putting money into something over eight years, pretty soon the cost of that capital just eats you up," said Kristina Johnson, the former undersecretary in the Department of Energy and CEO of Enduring Hydro, a company that develops hydropower projects. "Given that, it's not surprising decades go by and things don't

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