As his last official hurrah, Pleasant Grove's mayor is teaming up with a local entrepreneur to launch an ambitious green project he hopes will change the city, the West and the world.

"It is a whole new way to generate power," said Robert Mount, president and CEO of Power Innovations, based in Lindon. "It does change how we traditionally generate power. We feel this could bring state, regional and international focus to our local community."

Interestingly, Mayor Mike Daniels's idea is actually based on a technology as old as the city, abandoned a century ago, which is being revived and combined with a brand-new technology developed by Mount. The idea is to let Mother Nature, hand-in-hand with breakthrough technology, make electricity for the city using snow-melt water from the top of the mountains as it is piped down to the city for drinking.

"It might just help us change the whole model for how we manage utility costs," Daniels said.

The idea came from wanting Pleasant Grove to be a leader in green living, he said.

"When we saw that stimulus money was being spent on things that do not clearly have a return, we wondered how we could do something to benefit the American people," Daniels said. "We did some research and we found out that a hydroelectric plant had existed in Pleasant Grove in the late 1800s or early 1900s, right at Battle Creek Mountain."

In those days, a reservoir was built at the mountain top and a wooden flume brought water to a turbine at the bottom of the mountain and generated electricity. Preliminary expert opinion indicates that Pleasant Grove could revive the technology using the city's modern culinary water lines that run down the mountain, and generate enough electricity to power City Hall and other city buildings and services.

"We started thinking how we could replicate something like that in our day and age without a lot of expense," Daniels said. "We already have millions of taxpayer dollars invested in our culinary water system... We have miles of pipe that go up into the mountain to collect the water and bring it down."

The water actually comes down too fast -- containing too much energy -- and the city uses a pressure-reducing valve to slow the water. Simply put, replacing that valve with a turbine would serve the same purpose while at the same time generating electricity.

All of this might be old-hat except for one important detail, said Mount.

Mount says he has developed, built and proven a new kind of turbine that creates what he calls high-resolution, full-load power whether the generation source -- mountain run-off, in this case -- is flowing variably high or low.

Traditionally, power is generated on set-speed turbines, but Mount's new technology changes all that.

"What we are able to do is get power out whether the speed is slow or fast, a high resolution power," Mount said. "In the city here, as the water rolls down the mountain, whether it is a small flow and it turns it slowly, or a lot of water and it turns it fast, we still get a full load-quality power."

In a recent council meeting, Daniels told elected officials that this is one project he is working feverishly to see well into fruition before he leaves office in January.

Daniels and other city officials took the idea to Washington, D.C., where they elicited the help of Sen. Bob Bennett, who added $1 million to the 2010 congressional budget bill to fund the project. That bill has not passed yet, but Daniels is optimistic the money will come, likely in early 2010.

With that success, Daniels expanded his vision, taking the plan to the State Energy Advisor's Office.

With state help, a committee has been formed that includes other municipalities and businesses in an effort to explore how other Wasatch Front cities could use the same technology as part of their existing water systems.

"It started to take on a little bit of a life," Daniels said.

The committee is working on two goals. The first is fine-tuning a working prototype, about the size of a golf cart, which has already been created and demonstrated twice, using a gravity-fed fire hydrant as the water source. The second goal is to standardize the project so that it can be replicated "throughout the wasatch front and western united states. It is a little bit of an ambitious goal."

In addition to giving city services energy independence, there is another benefit that could prove extremely valuable, and already had some local energy companies interested. The most valuable kind of electricity is that which can be generated to meet peak demand, which happens during the day in summer. Peak snowmelt flow down battle creek mountain into pleasant grove's culinary system also happens during daytime in summer.

"Power companies have expressed interest because there is this potential to generate additional high demand, high-value electricity," daniels said. "There is some real theoretical benefit here that needs to be looked at. "It deserves exploration because it would return something to the taxpayers, a benefit on a very current problem we need to resolve not just in our state, but in our nation and internationally. We are looking at ways to clean up the environment and be more efficient. This has high potential."