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What is the potential for producing electricity on the Mississippi River?

That is the question that will be discussed Tuesday in a daylong conference at Western Illinois University Quad-Cities, Moline, co-hosted by River Action Inc., Davenport and Western.

The Mississippi River certainly contains enough water to produce electricity; the drawback is that there is not much fall in elevation, according to a paper prepared by Western Illinois professor Roger Viadero and two graduate students in advance of the workshop.

The two exceptions are at Lock and Dam 19 at Keokuk, Iowa, where there is a commercial-scale hydropower facility, and at Lock and Dam 2 in Hastings, Minnesota, where there is a smaller one.

Any new electricity-generating structure — either a retrofit of an existing dam or the building of a new facility — would be a "low-head" facility, where the fall of the water is less than 30 feet, Viadero's paper states. These low-head systems have correspondingly low electric generating capacities.