New idea: Portable Siphon-Hydro?

As a kid, I loved to play chemist on my front porch with a collection of bottles, jars, buckets and other containers filled with water and aquarium tubing.  My friends and I would add various colors of food dye to the water and then move water from container to container using gravity to siphon water through the tubing.  

This morning (in the shower, where I do my best thinking) I was thinking about how to harness the water power that runs through japanese mountain roadside gutters.  These concrete gutters are everywhere in Japan.



Japan has tons of slope and plenty of rain 60in/1500mm per year.  The kinetic energy flowing through these gutters is awesome.

I started to wonder if a siphon could be used to suck water out of these gullies, then attached to some form of micro-hydro...  pelton wheel, whatever, then an outgoing hose from there.  Then I thought, could it be made portable?  

Besides random guerilla power generation... I imagine 2 uses:

1) Moving water around one's land... say you have a pond or a series of ponds... you could use the siphon-hydro to irrigate a field, to move water from pond to pond, to water livestock, etc.  

2) Portable demonstrations of micro-hydro viability... considering micro-hydro is one of the cheaper underutilized technologies out there...

3) temporary power generation in remote areas

Tell me why this won't work?  Anybody want to build a prototype?  

If all the "gutters" look the way they do in this photo, how are you going to connect? 
Idealy you would need to connect from the side or the bottom and trench down hill.

I see your thinking, and it is a good one, assuming that the water in the gutters is always present.  Also, what is the "water"  is it sewage, gray water, rainwater, ....?  is it safe enough to handle?

And does it need filtered for debris?

One could design a simple filter system and then use a small pump to extract the water (assuming this would even be allowed) and run it through a system of ever narrowing pipes (increasing pressure) and then some type of turbine to generate power.  Should the power generated be significantly more than the power to run the pump it would be a nice set up.