Tiny amount of pressure? 400 psi over a 1000' drop is tiny? And pressure drop isn't the same as energy.
1 MW is not an inconsiderable amount of energy and putting 10 of these gensets in line is really not a big deal, btw. Go look at a 1MW ICE genset and come back and tell me how "tiny" it is. Go try to power 1000 homes for 24 hours and tell me how easy it was for you. No, it's not a 1000 MWe nuke plant. Many thermal plants are in the single to low double digit MWe range. This is certainly on the scale of run of the river hydro plants (which is what this is). It is also certainly on the scale of small scale solar - and best of all - it's *baseload* power, which is more valuable.
We Americans are so spoiled with our power prices, we completely forget how hard it is to generate a measly 1MWe of base load without hydro, fossil fuels, or nuclear. It's a lot of power. And welcome to the reality of the 21st century. The low hanging fruit is gone, and new power generation will be distributed, small-scale and more expensive. Why? It's all that's left to develop.
And I'm spending a lot of effort, because you're challenging the legitimacy of a *bankable* power project, albeit a small one, with absolutely no capacity or willingness to evaluate its true merits. You have produced nothing to demonstrate that it's a bad project. Yes, they are small gensets. But they are not lying about that. They do not appear to be lying about efficiency capacity factor (it's modest for a water turbine, but excellent compared to other renewable technologies -even traditional hydro) either, so it's unclear what your beef is other than you're not able to do the arithmetic required to evaluate the technology.
Are they using a turbine that bears more than a passing resemblance to a Darius turbine? Yes. Is the Darius super-efficient? No. But the developer has the constraint of not blocking the water flow if the rotor locks up. Might they have bearing service issues? Maybe, but the rotor won't shut off the water. So there you go, engineering compromise. It's a low CAPEX way to get up to 100kW per genset. Just put a splice into an existing water main and go. It's one of the few small scale power generation ideas that I've seen that might really make economic sense because aside from the turbine, it looks all COTS. It's the type of energy project a small company with three principals should be - and is capable of - executing.
You don't seem to understand what a bankable power project is. There is a high bar that one must clear in order to get a power purchase agreement, pass bank's engineer(s) muster, and pass the utility engineer's evaluation. Many try. Most fail. Oh and don't forget the environmental permit, construction permits, etc. Maybe this technology won't stand up over time, but clueless yahoos rarely clear all those hurdles to execute a utility power project.
Lastly, if you're so good at evaluating power projects, Ian, maybe you should get off the bench and go execute a few and show us how it's done. Or at least give PG&E a ring and let them know what idiots their engineers are. I think you'll find they're well-aware that this won't replace the power they buy from Bonneville dam.
Do post photos of your PPA and first-round funding agreement from your equity investors.