Gary Franc, Project Reviewer
Mr. Franc possess over 40 years of hydroelectric engineering, operations and development experience with 25 years involved with Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issues dealing with licensing, relicensing and Part 12 dam safety compliance issues. He currently is a sole proprietor specializing in FERC licensing and compliance, and due diligence for potential hydro acquisitions.
His areas of expertise include water resources modeling, hydrology, hydraulics, finance, database management, stochastic processes, statistics and application software development, with an extensive knowledge and use of all the US Army Corps’ Hydrologic Engineering Center’s (HEC) packages.
Mr. Franc has managed studies focused on identifying new potential conventional hydropower, water supply and pumped storage sites and the acquisition of existing hydro assets. He has considerable experience in the development of site hydrology, including:
- Unregulated inflow
- Flood-flow frequency analysis
- Drought contingency plans
- River-channel and reservoir routing
- Open-channel and rainfall runoff modeling and analysis, and
- Development of probable maximum precipitation (PMP) and/or probable maximum floods (PMF) as they relate to Inflow Design Floods (IDF), spillway adequacy and emergency action plans (EAP)
Mr. Franc has developed proprietary computer packages to afford detailed study and development of energy potential and financial estimates for existing and proposed turbine upgrades, and turbine additions. He has been a LIHI independent reviewer since 2013.