Hi all, I've been lurking here for quite a while and am thinking about taking the plunge, so to speak.

We've got an old water pipeline running through our property that used to be the municipal water supply for this small town in Wyoming. It's mostly abandoned these days, so I was thinking about slapping a turbine on it. The head is about 133 feet, and it's 1 foot in diameter. I figure it could handle 3 cfs (cubic feet per second) without friction losses getting too much; I've had others check my math, and I figure it could put out about ~20 kW of usable power, perhaps as much as 25 kW, depending on the efficiency we can achieve and taking into account all losses.

It'll be pretty expensive, but it'd probably save about $1,000/month in utilities on average, as we go through buku amounts of propane in the winter. Only problem is that the utility only wants to buy back the excess electricity for like < $0.029/kWh...

Thus, I'm wracking my brain for some sort of value-added application that would make more than 3 cents/kWh of energy produced. I was thinking maybe of running some greenhouses or something like that, but of course naturally a bitcoin mining server farm also comes to mind.

So what do you think? Would it be worth it? If so, how much BTC could one expect to gain from 20 kW of energy? Since I can always get 3 cents/kWh from the utility, it'd have to make more than that to be worth it (and cover the cost of the ASIC servers of course).

One advantage is we are located in one of the coldest spots in the lower 48. I don't think the summer temperatures this year ever exceeded 80 degrees F and there's snow on the ground close to like 6 months out of the year. Just had our first frost a couple of days ago.... 

Also, we got a big workshop used to store tractors and haying equipment, so we've got plenty of space that's far enough away from the house that noise shouldn't be a problem. Would just have to get it wired up to handle that much power.

One caveat: this is going to take some time to make happen. Still got to get the water rights lined up, but that shouldn't be a problem, as it's a non-consumptive use of water that will simply go back into the creek. I can't see it happening much sooner than summer of 2016....

Also, while I consider myself to be rather computer savvy--I've done some networking and minor computer programming--but I'm definitely not a computer science or electrical engineering expert geek. But I don't know if that's really necessary.

Thanks!