Bijuli Ghar

Micro Hydro in Peru

2008-05-23T16:24:00.000-07:00

This video demonstrates how Practical Action's micro-hydro work is meeting local communities essential energy needs, and improving their living standards.

Banki Turbine Hydro System

2008-05-23T16:05:00.000-07:00

Built from scrap steel and using home-brew electronics, this hydro-turbine generates a steady 500W at 240VAC all winter long.

Hydro Power in Kenya

2008-05-23T16:01:00.000-07:00

Here is a short video on a micro-hydro power plant in Kenya. The power is used for various things, including television and refrigeration.

Turbine from scrap

2008-05-23T15:58:00.000-07:00

This turbine is made from scrap that uses the water fall off of an existing dam. It is a more traditional water wheel type turbine. It has paddles made from PVC pipe halves and appears to be making a decent amount of power.

Sundermann Hydro Turbine

2008-05-23T15:55:00.000-07:00

This Turbine is unique, because it uses lift to turn the turbine rather momentum like the typical hydro turbine. The advantage of this design is that it is supposed to be able to produce power in low head low flow situations, where other wise hydro power would not be an option.

How Nepali flag was born?

2008-05-23T12:11:00.001-07:00

Meaning of Nepali Flag:
The flag of Nepal is the only national flag which is not rectangular, being based upon two separate pennants which belonged to rival branches of the Rana dynasty, which formerly ruled the country. The two pennants were first joined in the last century, but it was not adopted as the official flag until 1962, when a constitutional form of government was established.
The moon in the upper part represents the royal house. The sun in the lower part symbolizes a branch of the Rana family, members of which acted as prime ministers until 1961.
The charges are now said to represent the hope that Nepal itself will last as long as the sun and the moon. The style of these heavenly bodies was streamlined on December 16, 1962. The coat of arms still portrays these charges with facial features. Crimson is deemed the national color.
Motto on their coat of arms: "The mother and the Mother Earth are more important than the heavenly kingdom."
This flag is like most Hindu flags - a pennon. It is believed that, God Vishnu had organized the Nepali people and given them this flag, with the sun and moon as emblems on it.

Small is Still Beautiful

2008-05-23T07:15:00.000-07:00

Small is Still Beautiful
By Maurice Malanes

When the late British economist E.F.Schumacher came out with his bestseller, Small is Beautiful, in the 1970s, many economists dismissed him as a wishful thinker,whose suggested development formula appealed only to hippies. But his proposed development schemes towards "the small and the gentle" are now again gaining adherents.
Schumacher has said that ever-bigger machines and ever-bigger development structures do not only leave bigger wounds and bigger scars on our planet; they also tend to concentrate wealth in a few hands. Amid the current backlash and conflicts created by ever-bigger development projects rammed down the throats of many people, Schumacher, if he were alive today, would probably tell the proponents of bigness, "I told you so."
Many Third World countries are now obsessed with bigness. From Malaysia and Indonesia to the Philippines, governments are seeking to build the biggest airport and seaport, the biggest mining operation, the biggest golf course, and the biggest mega-mall. Erecting all these enormous structures requires equally enormous amounts of energy and power; so governments have to build super-big hydroelectric dams, geothermal plants and coal-fired power plants.
Given its growth targets and projections, the Philippines, for example, expects that electricity sales will increase from 33,532 GWh in 1996 to 148,112 GWh in 2010 and to 426,349 GWh in 2025. Demand for electricity will follow the same trend. From 5,855 MW in 1996, electricity demand will shoot up to 25,564 MW in 2010 and 73,587 MW in 2025, translating to an average growth rate of 11.1 percent between 1996 and 2010, and 7.3 percent between 2010 and 2025.
To meet the growing demand for electricity, a total of 92,138 MW must be generated between 1996 and 2025. The Philippine government has thus firmed up projects totaling 12,978 for commissioning from 1996 to 2005. For this period, major capacity additions include 8,660 MW from coal-fired plants; 6,500 MW from gas-fired plants; 5,515 MW, geothermal plants; 4,732 MW, large and semi-large hydro plants; and 3,947 MW from renewable energy sources .
All these figures show that as societies "progress" (which means as societies continue to consume more and more goods), the more we need to squeeze our planet to produce the energy to produce the goods we continue to consume. Unfortunately, as Schumacher has reiterated a now familiar line from Mahatma Gandhi, our planet can provide for all of our needs but not for our greed. But the proponents of globalized free trade continue to exploit human greed to the point of creating more and more artificial "needs" for the market of new goods. The result is disastrous as societies become obsessed with bigness under the illusory hope that bigness can help satisfy human greed.
Bigness, however, continues to cause ever-bigger problems for both people and the environment.

Irony
One irony of "development" is imbalance. Development tends to be concentrated more in the metropolis and other urban centers as rural villages are left out in the cold. Big hydroelectric dams, for example, displace indigenous folk, but these folk remain literally in the dark, as their villages are the least priority in government electrification programs and other social services.
A case in point are the indigenous Ibaloi in Benguet Province in northern Philippines. In the 1950s and 1960s, hundreds of Ibaloi families were dislocated when the 75-MW Ambuklao and 100-MW Binga dams were built along the Agno River. Linked to the Luzon grid, the power generated by the two dams has helped supply the power needs of mining companies and cities as far as Manila, which is more than 300 kilometers south of the Ibaloi community in Bokod town.
On the other hand, the Ibaloi communities around the two dams were energized only in the 1980s. Government up to now has yet to properly compensate the Ibaloi folk the two dams displaced.
The Ibaloi's wounds have not yet healed and government has embarked again on a new bigger dam downstream of the Ambuklao and Binga dams. It is feared that the 345-MW San Roque Multi-purpose Dam Project, which began construction in February 1998 and is more than half-done, will submerge three Ibaloi villages (population: 20,000) once the dam's water level rises from siltation by erosion and mine wastes from upstream.
Once the dam is completed in 2003, the power to be generated will help reinforce the Luzon grid, which supplies electricity to Manila and all of Luzon's urban centers. The displaced Ibaloi folk are, therefore, not the priority in the power-generation project, which was conceived as a government "flagship project" to help respond to a power crisis the country faced in 1995 and 1996.
Indigenous peoples elsewhere share the tragic saga of the Ibaloi. In Africa's Senegal River Valley, the World Bank-funded Manantali and Diama dams did not only displace 100,000 households. The Bank approved a US$38 million loan for the dam turbine's installation and operation without providing for a water-management plan to prevent water-borne diseases .
Malaria and schistosomiasis rose dramatically since the Manantali and Diama dams were built. It was estimated that adequate measures to manage the flows from the dam could reduce deaths by 2,500 from 8,000 lives taken each year. Newly created water bodies, such as irrigation canals and ponds, breed schistosomiasis-bearing snails, which seasonal fluctuations in salt inflows used to control.
The Senegal and Ibaloi folk's horror stories of "damnation" are replicated in other dam constructions in Brazil, Namibia, India's Narmada River Valley, Malaysia's Bakun community, Laos, Nepal, and China.
Elsewhere, conflicts have become so intense that they have led to violence and killings. The International Rivers Network (IRN), an independent global body monitoring mega-dams worldwide, has reported the killing in October 1997 of Fulgencio Manoel da Silva, an articulate Brazilian activist who helped lead protests against the Itaparica Dam, which uprooted 7,000, including Da Silva's family, from their homes and farms.
What happened to Da Silva is familiar to Filipinos who had also mourned the killing in April 1980 of Kalinga tribal chief Macliing Dulag, one of the staunch leaders in the opposition against a World Bank-funded series of dams along the Chico River in northern Philippines.
Also in Brazil, over 6,200 people, including the last of the Ofaie Xavante Indian tribe, were forced out of their homes when the 2,250-square kilometer Porto Primavera Dam reservoir was filled with water in May 1998. The Sao Paulo Electric Company has settled only 340 out of the 1,700 affected families.
A proposed hydroelectric dam also continues to be a dagger pointed at the heart of a community of 15,000 Himba people in Namibia. The dam is expected to flood the Himba lands, thus, threatening to erase the Himbas' culture and way of life.
The world's most ambitious dam thus far, China's Three Gorges Dam, according to IRN, will displace 1.9 million people, who include both indigenous and non-indigenous folk. The 400-mile long, 600-foot high and two-kilometer wide dam will inundate 13 cities, 140 towns, 1,352 villages, and 650 factories. IRN has warned that those who are going to be displaced are poised to resist.
We have been talking about big dams alone and one thing is clear: human lives and health, ecology and biodiversity, and cultures have to be sacrificed just to produce power. We need enormous power to support not only basic needs, but also consumerist lifestyles in the metropolis.
People in metropolitan societies debate whether a microwave oven is a luxury or a basic need. But chances are village folk in remote hinterlands have not seen the light of Thomas Alva Edison's invention - the incandescent electric bulb.

Thinking small
Amid the global madness for bigness, the small-is-beautiful alternative offers promise and hope for upland folk who simply dream to replace their kerosene lamps and pine pith with incandescent or flourescent bulbs.
The upland village of Lon-oy in San Gabriel town, La Union Province in northern Philippines is a good example. For the 1,000 or so Lon-oy villagers, March 31, 2001 was the first day of the rest of their lives. This was the day when they first saw the light from an electric bulb after Bishop Joel Pachao of the Episcopal Church of the Philippines blessed and inaugurated a 15-kilowatt micro-hydro power plant the community helped build.
Almost three years in the making, the micro-hydro power project will now finally light up the nights of the remote upland village after Bishop Pachao ceremoniously switched on the power from a power house at the foot of a ravine along the Lon-oy River. With a maximum average of 80 watts allotted per household, electricity from the project will be used mainly for lighting. Television sets and other appliances such as refrigerators and ovens are not allowed. Otherwise, the community will have to worry about breakdowns due to power overload.
Lighting up the 130 households of the village alone has begun to change the lives of the villagers. Instead of burning their midnight kerosene lamps, public school teachers can now work more comfortably under flourescent electric lights, doing their lesson plans or checking papers. Broom-makers, who used to be at the mercy of the daylight, can now make brooms for sale until late evening. Sitting around a winnower filled with legumes and beans to peel off, members of a family also exchange stories and riddles, sing songs, or simply converse before they go to bed.
Early in the morning, members of an association of village women can start baking bread in their liquefied petroleum gas-fueled oven in their newly built bakery, which the Department of Labor and Employment funded. Some women are now thinking of other livelihood projects, which they can do under their bright light at dawn or late evening. These other livelihoods will augment their income from farming.
On the lighter side, at least one villager has said he can now see the sweet smile and other "body language" of his wife under the flourescent light.
Lon-oy is one of 10,000 villages not covered by the state-run National Power Corporation's grid areas. In its Philippine Energy Plan, the Department of Energy had targeted to energize all of the 1,409 municipalities (at least the town proper) by 1996, all of the 35,213 barangays or villages by 2010 and another 10.2 million households by 2018. The program also aims to bring electricity to an additional 889,912 households by 2025, bringing the total number of households to be energized to 11.1 million (Department of Energy, 1996). Under this plan Lon-oy would be one of the villages to be energized by 2010. One problem is this is only on paper.
There are other hitches in the government's rural electrification program. And this is not only because government has to displace people as a result of building mega-dams or sacrificing public health in exchange for coal-fired power plants. Rural electrification through the National Power Corporation's conventional grid areas is too costly for rural folk to afford. Rural villagers will hardly be able to pay the cost of electricity once the National Power Corporation seeks to impose bills based on rates that seek to regain investments and earn profit. The best alternative for off-grid areas, where the poorest of the poor live, are community-based and community-run micro-hydro power projects, so says Victoria Lopez of the nongovernment Sibat (Sibol ng Agham at Teknolohiya - Wellspring of Science and Technology).
Citing success stories other than Lon-oy's, Lopez says community-based and community-managed small renewable energy projects are the least costly, thus, more affordable and sustainable. For villages such as northern Philippines' Cordillera hinterlands, the most appropriate and cheapest source of energy are mountain springs and tributaries of the upland region's seven major river systems.

Empowering
Lon-oy's success was no picnic. The project's triumph was not as simple as procuring the funds, buying the equipment, and installing the facility. It also involved educating and organizing the community folk, a job which the Episcopal Diocese of Northern Philippines undertook to prepare the community. That most of the community folk are Episcopalians helped the Diocese a lot in its organizing and education work.
For its part, Sibat, through its engineers, did the technical part of the project and helped train community folk on repair and maintenance. It was also through Sibat's prodding that the Department of Energy approved and channeled some P1.5 million (US$750,000) directly to the community.
But the most empowering of all was the community folk's participation in the whole project -- from planning to implementation. The community folk have also invested a counterpart in the project - their labor. Almost every one can claim ownership of the project, which came about only after the men, women and children picked up their picks and shovels to dig the diversion canal; hauled gravel, sand and cement, and did other back-breaking labor.
In working for the project, the community folk resorted to their age-old tradition of cooperative self-help or reciprocal labor, which is still very much alive when someone builds or moves a house or when one villager plants and harvests rice. Through their initiative, members of the community decided that each household would render 50 days of labor for the project.
Luz Marzan, a mother of seven, for example, worked 26 days, mostly hauling gravel and sand. Her husband and two children rendered a total of 24 days. Some opted to work for more than 50 days, the excess of which they sold to other families who, for one reason or another, could not render manual labor. Teachers and other public servants, for instance, could not help out except on weekends. Thus, as the community decided by consensus, other members of the community could pay P100 (US$2) per household in place of a day's labor.
Having invested their time and sweat, the Lon-oy villagers have a big stake in the project. They therefore cannot afford to let their efforts go to waste. This is where sustainability begins.
Community-run, simple micro-hydro power projects can really change lives and lighten the burden of rural folk. An earlier micro-hydro power project built in the equally far-flung sub-village of Ngibat, Tinglayan town in Kalinga Province, also in northern Philippines, was the first success story, which has now been told and retold. Jointly initiated by the nongovernment Montanosa Research and Development Center and Sibat, the project has helped debunk the perception that electrification is possible only through government's framework of bigness.
The Ngibat micro-hydro power project, which can generate five kilowatts of electricity, does not only light up the community of 32 households. With a maximum 40 watts allotted per household, the project, which was inaugurated in January 1994, can also run a community rice mill (Sibat Case Study, 2000). This facility has helped unburden women and children who, by tradition, pound rice every morning and afternoon. Freed from such tedious labor, the women can now engage in other livelihoods while the children have more time to review their school lessons.
The project has also helped speed up the work of local blacksmiths who work at an average of eight hours a day ten times a month, or three to four months a year. The micro-hydro power project provides for the 492 kwh/month total power needs of an electric grinder, drill press, and hand drill.
Another livelihood the micro-hydro power project enhanced is the manufacture of basi or sugarcane wine. Since 1997, it has powered a sugarcane presser, which is twice faster than a carabao-(water buffalo) drawn wooden presser. The sugarcane extract is fermented into wine, which is now the main income-generating livelihood of 26 households.
A simple micro-hydro power project, as the Lon-oy and Ngibat projects show, can really change lives. If it can help create rural livelihoods and raise incomes, rural folk need not migrate and help congest already crowded cities. It will also be unnecessary for rural folk to sell their working carabao (water buffalo) and mortgage their house and land to pay their way for jobs overseas, which, as experience shows, do not always turn out to bring the much-sought "better life".

Management
The micro-hydro power project's empowering impact can be seen not only in economic terms. This is also exhibited in the increased capacity of the community to manage and sustain the project.
One management scheme both the Ngibat and Lon-oy community folk internalized is watershed protection. Both communities have learned early on that unless they protect their watersheds, their rivers will run dry and no water will run the turbines and the generators in their powerhouses. Community folk, therefore, don't clear crucial watersheds for their swidden farms.
Another is how the community sets policies and guidelines on how to use and maintain the project. In Lon-oy, the community folk have computed and decided by consensus that each household must pay to the community cooperative P35 (US$0.71) a month for the maintenance and upkeep of the facility. For the same purpose, Ngibat community folk have set a monthly flat rate of P22 (US$0.45) per household. The monthly dues of both Ngibat and Lon-oy communities are 15 to 20 times lower than the minimum dues collected by commercial electric cooperatives in the urban and other grid areas. For humanitarian reasons, Ngibat's old widows and others who, for one reason or another, are unable to pay in cash or in kind, are exempted or subsidized by the other more productive members of the community.
The community's direct hand in running and setting policies for the project is empowering enough for the local folk. This is practically local autonomy and democratic governance at work.

Micro-hydro bias
Sibat's Victoria Lopez does not mind hiding her bias for micro-hydro power. For her, micro-hydro power, compared to other renewable energy sources, remains the cheapest and the most appropriate for off-grid remote upland villages. It can also electrify an entire village at least cost, compared to solar power, for example, which has less capacity. Of course, the latter has its use, too, particularly in areas where there are no rivers. But in upland villages with rivers and tributaries, micro-hydro power is the most superior.
Micro-hydro power has another edge. Equipment needed such as the turbine can be locally fabricated, thus helping promote and develop local technology. An engineer from the government-run Pangasinan State University in northern Philippines, for example, fabricated the turbine used in the Lon-oy project. In case of a breakdown, local technicians can easily repair or replace a locally- made equipment. Not so with solar panels, which are imported.
Companies in Western countries are now cashing in on the trend towards developing earth-friendly renewable energy. To Sibat, it is best if the Philippines, or any Third World country for that matter, does not fall prey to becoming a mere market of equipment and gadgets from the North. Even if crude, a country's technology, according to Sibat, must grow. And this cannot happen if a country contents itself with being just a market of technology and equipment from the North.
Ninety-five percent of equipment and gadgets used for all of Sibat-aided micro-hydro power projects are manufactured locally. This only proves that given the opportunity, national technologies can flourish.
Unfortunately, local technologies fail to thrive because Third World governments, such as the Philippines, prefer to contract overseas companies to build big dams, if not coal-fired or geothermal power plants. These companies do not only bring in their experts and consultants. They also bring in their technologies and gadgets. Under this arrangement, these companies are helping create markets for their home countries' technology and gadgets and facilities. This stifles the growth of national technologies.

Brain Drain
Their technical support no doubt has helped in the success of the micro-hydro power projects. But the engineers of Sibat prefer to remain low-key and humble. Why? Because they say the whole success of a project lies in how well organized and educated the members of a community are.
But the technical know-how of Sibat's engineers is equally crucial. And they don't just have the know-how; they also have the commitment to serve poor rural folk. This makes them a rare breed amid the brain-drain of technical experts who prefer to work for multinational corporations within and outside the Philippines. Lured by higher pay, many of the country's engineers are helping develop new technologies and products and produce wealth for multinational corporations.
The three technical engineers of Sibat - mechanical engineer Frank Taguba, civil engineer Paul Tabiolo and electrical engineer Manuel Maputi - may not have thick wallets. But the three, whom Sibat describes as "RE (renewable energy) engineers," all say they are rich in psychic rewards. During an inauguration of another micro-hydro power project in a village in Kalinga Province, Frank Taguba, for example, hugged a colleague and cried. But his tears were tears of joy - joy in seeing the concrete result of a project he helped work out.
These engineers prefer to remain incognito. But in the hearts of simple hinterland folk, whose hard lives a five or 15-kilowatt micro-hydro power facility helped ease, Sibat's engineers stand taller than politicians who promise heaven when they are courting votes.
The other engineers who opt to work for multinationals cannot be blamed. In a country, which has yet to appreciate how to maximize the skills of its own experts, the option left for other engineers is to search for job opportunities elsewhere. Result: the country is drained of its own talents and experts.
But with a few committed engineers like Sibat's Taguba, Tabiolo and Maputi, hope is not lost on the Philippines. People like them can help transform the lives of needy village folk with the click of an electric switch from a micro-hydro-powered generator.

The Alternative Game
Filipino activists protesting the construction of mega-dams that displace thousands of indigenous peoples often encounter a common remark and question in public forums: "You are good at exposing the threats of big dams and opposing these. But what do you propose as alternatives?"
Chances are these "expose-oppose" activists are tongue-tied on what to say and how to answer such remarks and questions. But the simple answer lies in one secret of good journalism: show rather than tell, that is.
Documenting and showing how "success stories" such as Lon-oy's and Ngibat's were made and disseminating these to as many people as possible can help convince others that there are indeed alternatives to "development projects" governments often ram down people's throats. In so doing, "expose-oppose". activists can be transformed into "expose-oppose-and-propose" activists.
For want of any information about alternatives, ordinary folk often accept without any informed judgment "development projects" governments impose. But informed about other options, particularly the "small and gentle" alternatives, people in the grassroots can be wiser.
Many policy makers, who are also in the dark about people- and earth-friendly alternatives, may yet have to see the wisdom of the small, the gentle and the beautiful. It is people and our planet after all, so says E.F. Schumacher, who matter in development. Not profit at all costs. Otherwise, that would be global harakiri.

Micro-hydro power: the basics

2008-05-23T06:52:00.000-07:00

How does it work?
Water from the river is channelled through a settling basin, which helps to remove sediment that could harm the turbine. The water then flows into the Forebay Tank where it is directed downhill through a pipe called a penstock. When the water reaches the bottom, it drives a specially designed turbine to produce the electricity.

What does it cost?
Costs vary depending upon the particular project, but as a rough guide, these projects cost just over £800 per kilowatt of power generated. So a system with a capacity of six kilowatts - enough to drive a mill and provide electric light to a community of 20 families - would cost about £5,000.
Once the system is in operation, local people pay a small charge to use the electricity. This covers maintenance and the eventual cost of replacement.

Why is it needed?
Of course, every community’s particular needs are different. But in general, access to energy is a vital stage in the development of remote villages like these.
It can lead to swift and significant improvements in education, sanitation, healthcare and the overall standard of living. These benefits are achieved both directly - as in the provision of light - and indirectly - as the time and money that people save is redirected into other projects.

How long will it last?
Micro-hydro systems like these are designed to operate for a minimum of twenty years if they are properly looked after. That’s why we train local people to build and maintain their own system. And by making a small charge for use, communities can accumulate enough money to pay for the replacement of the unit at the end of its useful life.
Once schemes are set up, they should continue to function indefinitely without any more external funding.

What’s the environmental impact?
Unlike traditional power stations that use fossil fuels, micro-hydro generators have practically no effect on the environment. And because they don’t depend on dams to store and direct water, they’re also better for the environment than large-scale hydro-electric stations.
In fact, by reducing the need to cut down trees for firewood and increasing farming efficiency, micro-hydro has a positive effect on the local environment.

Plant's cost (Year Vs. $)

2008-05-23T06:16:00.000-07:00

WORLD RENEWABLE ENERGY CONGRESS VI
INVITED PAPER

Micro-hydro power: an option for socio-economic development
By Dr Smail Khennas, and Andrew Barnett

The lack of energy supplies in rural areas is a chronic problem. In many developing countries less than 10% of the rural population has access to electricity. Rural electrification through conventional means such as grid connection or diesel generators is very costly. Fortunately, abundant water resources for energy production are available in some poor countries.

Decentralized small-scale water power or micro-hydro schemes (defined as plant between 10kW and 100 kW) are a particularly attractive option in many rural areas. Water is a traditional source of power in some parts of Nepal, Peru, Sri Lanka etc. The paper highlights the importance of micro-hydro power in the socio-economic development of isolated hilly and mountain areas. The paper is based on cases drawn from Asia, Latin America and Africa
Micro hydro is perhaps the most mature of the modern small-scale decentralised energy supply technologies used in developing countries. There are thought to be tens of thousands of plant in the “micro” range operating successfully in China[1], and significant numbers are operated in wide ranging countries such as Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Vietnam and Peru. This experience shows that in certain circumstances micro hydro can be profitable in financial terms, while at others, even unprofitable plant can exhibit such strong positive impacts on the lives of poor people.

One of the most important findings to emerge from the study of this experience is that micro hydro plant can achieve a wide range of quite different objectives. But much confusion and misunderstanding arises when all micro hydro plant are lumped together. Analytically, it is therefore important to judge the viability of each micro hydro investment in terms of a specific objective. Similarly, in the formulation of government or donor policy, it is important not to expect micro hydro to achieve many, often conflicting, objectives. For instance it is probably not possible to provide electricity to very poor people in remote locations through micro hydro and make a high return on capital

1. The market for micro-hydro power :
Supplying improved energy services to people for the first time is difficult; but supplying such services profitably to very poor people who live far away from roads and the electricity grid pose a particularly difficult challenge. However micro hydro compares well with other energy supply technologies in these difficult markets. But despite this, micro hydro appears to have been relatively neglected by donors, the private sector and governments in the allocation of resources and attention. In the past rural electrification by means of grid extension was the option favoured by donors.
But the relative neglect of micro hydro has also been in part due to the fact that the circumstances under which it is financially profitable, has not been systematically established, particularly in ways that investors find credible. In addition, while it is known that the growth and sustainability of the micro-hydro sub-sector depends on certain types of infrastructure and institutional investments, it was often not clear which elements of this “enabling environment” is essential nor how it is best financed.
This contribution attempts to rectify these omissions by analysing and then synthesising the experience of micro hydro over many years across a broad range of developing countries. Primary evidence was obtained from Peru, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe and to a lesser extent Mozambique. On the basis of this evidence an attempt has been made to establish “best practice” in terms of the implementation and operation of sustainable installations.
The sample was drawn from comprehensive databases of micro-hydro plants in each of the five countries. It was selected using a typology which combined end uses (productive uses, electricity for lighting, combined end uses etc.) with types of ownership (Community-led projects, Projects implemented by central bodies such as the utilities, and Projects initiated by private entrepreneurs).
Although Zimbabwe and Mozambique have relatively few micro hydro plant operating, it was decided to include them in the sample to illustrate some of the special issues that are faced by countries trying to start programmes. The implications of experience elsewhere for these two countries is brought together in section.

2. Technology demonstration, social infrastructure, or small enterprise?
The field of micro hydro is “evolving”, particularly in relation to the motivation of project developers. In recent times most of the initial installations in each country might be said to be the result of “technology push”. That is, plants were installed to test their technical viability and their acceptability. This experience has established the technical reliability of the micro hydro systems, reduced their cost, and has resulted in substantial technical improvement. Micro hydro is now a mature technology that has been greatly improved by electronic load controllers, low cost turbine designs, the use of electric motors as generators[2], and the use of plastics in pipe work and penstocks.
The next group of projects is characterised by investments in micro hydro that were seen as part of the “social infrastructure” more akin to the provision of health services, roads and schools. This has often meant that this experience has generated little information on the capital and operating costs or cash flow returns of the investment, particularly of a form and quality that would be regarded as reliable by potential investors in conventional financial institutions. Indeed many of the promoters of this type of project justify their work solely in terms of contribution to social justice, the quality of life of marginalized people, and the environment. In Sri Lanka, for instance, many micro hydro plant have been installed primarily to ‘improve the quality of life by providing electric light’. And in Peru the key question for many project developers was ‘how long will the plant last, rather than how high is its rate of return or how quickly the capital will be paid back’.
More recently support programmes have returned to what might be called an older vision, when micro hydro are seen primarily in terms of securing livelihoods and the development of small profit making businesses. This is in part an admission that, like the previous attempts at rural electrification through grid extension, the sustainability of grant-based programmes is limited, and ways must be found to attract private capital if these programmes are to have anything but a marginal impact. However, Nepal has shown that small, almost subsistence businesses can survive using micro hydro power to mill grain. Over 900 micro hydro plant had been installed in Nepal by 1996, and over 80% of these were for grinding grain. In Nepal, in recent years there has been a quite rapid take up of the small (1 kW) “peltric” sets for generating small amounts of electricity. Introduced in the early 1990’s there were said to be over 250 in the first five years[3].
These very different starting points have important implications for what is regarded as success, and what performance indicators that have been used in their evaluation. Micro hydro as “social infrastructure” uses the approaches and indicators appropriate to schemes for the supply of drinking water, health clinics and schools. But micro hydro as “physical infrastructure” uses the approaches applied to electric power generation more generally, and to such investments as the provision of roads, and irrigation systems. Even more recently micro hydro has been seen in terms of small and medium enterprise development, and the role that such enterprises can play in “securing livelihoods”.

3. Competition in the allocation of scarce resources:
This means that there are hard choices to be made in the allocation of resources. Investments that are primarily intended to increase the adoption of micro hydro are likely to need to be financially viable and will therefore be located where sales to the grid are possible (and profitable), or where there are concentrations of effective demand (or there are so-called “anchor customers” who can pay for the bulk of the power supplied). Whereas programmes that are intended to primarily increase the “access” of specific groups of people to improved energy supplies are likely to be located were resource-poor live and this will frequently be in more remote areas.
Micro hydro developers and the financial institutions that they work with have to make choices between these two extremes of profitability and social impact. There is likely to be a middle ground where social impacts can be achieved profitably, but its size is not yet known. The review of programmes in Nepal and Sri Lanka both suggest that they have been explicitly motivated by ideas of social justice and fairness. Certainly rural people in many countries can be expected to ask why shouldn’t they be entitled to the levels of subsidy provided to urban dwellers.
But what is clear, is that many rural people will remain without electricity unless there is some redistribution of income of some sort from urban to rural areas.
There is a parallel here with arguments between the advocates of micro hydro and Ministries of Energy and their conventional utilities. Proponents of micro hydro are often disappointed that utilities will not take them more seriously. Certainly micro hydro often faces unfair competition from a highly subsidised grid, and from subsidised fossil fuels, but there is a genuine trade off between maximising the access of people to “efficient and affordable energy”, and doing so in those places where micro hydro (and other renewable energy) is the least cost. The scarce resource is not energy, but the capital to make energy useful. If the objective is to provide electricity to as many people as possible (rather than to distribute electricity evenly across the country), the most effective way of doing it will be through extensions of the grid. Similarly where utilities have very severe limits on capital, the ‘opportunity cost’ of capital at the margin rises to very high levels, explaining perhaps why they then opt for diesel generators rather than hydro (with its higher initial capital cost).

4. The economics of micro-hyro power and Participative approaches:
In the examples examined in the five countries, the capital cost of micro hydro ranges from US$ 655 in Nepal to US$5,630 per installed kilowatt, in constant 1998 prices[4]. The data for the full sample is set out in the following table.
An important conclusion is therefore that the costs per installed kilowatt are higher than the figures usually cited in the literature. This is partly due to the difficulty analysts have in establishing full costs on a genuinely comparative basis. A significant part of micro hydro costs can be met with difficult-to-value labour provided by the local community as “sweat equity”; meaningful dollar values for local costs are difficult to establish when they are inflating and rapidly depreciating relative to hard currencies; and there is little consistency in defining the boundaries of the systems being compared (for instance, how much of the distribution cost, or house wiring, is included, how much of the cost of the civil works contribute to water management and irrigation).

But more fundamentally the comparison of actual costs at the ‘micro’ level of individual plants (as indeed of any de-centralised energy supply systems) can also be misleading. Successful programmes require investments in the systems necessary for training, repair, marketing. The critical issue is that these tasks exhibit substantial economies of scale, in that the cost per micro hydro plant installed falls as the number of plant increases. Comparisons based on average costs will therefore be strongly influenced by the number of plant built.
Estimates of these ‘macro’ costs associated with developing and supporting a programme – sometimes referred to as “system overhead costs”[5] are also difficult to establish, particularly as many of the costs associated with Research and Development and the training of engineering workshops are “sunk costs” which took place over many years.

Participative approaches :

If the cost of micro hydro is too high for marginalized people, the financial cost can be reduced by involving the community in the process of project development. The cases studies show that these participative approaches have been used extensively in micro hydro development.

Community participation enables costs to be reduced in three ways:
It allows people to contribute their labour (or other communally owned asset such as land[6]) to the scheme. If people are under employed the opportunity cost of this labour can be close to zero, and anyway its use need not involve the transfer of cash. This is often described as “sweat equity” in that by contributing its labour the community gains a share in the ownership of the scheme;
involvement of the whole community enables the richer elements (richer households, small mills and shop owners) to carry the bulk of the costs and thereby make a service available to the poorer people in the community either through actual cross subsidy to the selling price (through a ‘lifeline tariff’) or by allowing them into the scheme at the marginal cost of including extra consumers rather than the average cost;
increasing the number of people involved in a scheme can reduce the cost to everyone when micro hydro schemes exhibit economies of scale.

However, while involvement of the community is certainly a necessary condition for the success of some types of schemes, and can lower costs, the process itself is costly and time consuming. These costs are associated with understanding the needs of different users (for instance including both men and women), developing community motivation and “ownership”, and in training. Such processes may take a number of years and can add significantly to the costs of the NGO or other agency involved in project development. If a single entrepreneur or a municipality is able to raise all the capital, it may well be that they can avoid the cost of community development and still have a successful micro hydro scheme.

5. Dissemination Strategies and the key agents:
In most cases it would appear that the governments in the countries examined do not have policies specifically for the development of micro hydro. Although some had policies to encourage rural electrification, these were usually through grid extension. Where there were policies to support a particular technology, such as solar photovoltaic, these tended to be driven by external donors. The main elements of the current expansion strategy are summarised in the table in appendix.
Agents of the state have played a significant, if intermittent role in encouraging micro hydro. In Nepal the Agricultural Development Bank appears to have been the lead institution, which then drew on the services of NGO. In Sri Lanka the utility (the Ceylon Electricity Board) similarly expressed an early interest in micro hydro and then drew on the services of an NGO and local consultant engineers.
The international financial institutions (both multilateral and bilateral) now appear to be taking an interest in Micro hydro. In the 1960’s and 1970’s these aid agencies invested heavily in rural electrification, but this was almost entirely through grid extensions. This experience, and particularly the sense that rural electrification was a bottomless pit of financially unsustainable projects, meant that they remained reluctant to fund more recent, decentralised, systems. However, they have begun to re-consider decentralised energy options, prompted no doubt by their new interest in renewable sources of energy[7] and by the enthusiasm of manufacturers of photovoltaics in industrialised countries.
In Sri Lanka the World Bank was persuaded to include micro hydro in its Energy Services Delivery loan, which was initially designed solely for PV. In Nepal substantial funding is now coming from Danida aimed at increasing the scale of the effort devoted to micro hydro (and PV), and to put the schemes on a more financially secure basis.
But perhaps the most important “agent” in the implementation of strategies for micro hydro have been the “project developers”. In most of the case study countries NGOs have been the main project developers as it is usually only not-for-profit agencies that can cope with the high transaction costs involved. However there are important cases where individual entrepreneurs develop their own projects. But almost regardless of the financing mechanisms or the strategies of governments and aid agencies, the critical factor has been the existence of these individuals or agencies that have had the skill to put the various elements of a micro hydro project together (technology, finance, project management, institutional structures) and the tenacity to see it through to operation.

The main forms of support – extending the concept of “intermediation”

A wide range of actions have to be brought together to ensure the success of micro hydro investments. These actions take place both at the micro level of particular investment in a hydro plant at a particular location, but they also take place at the macro level of policy formulation, and in the design and implementation of programmes of financial and other support.
In undertaking the case studies, it was found that the idea of “intermediation” offered a convenient way to group the many hundreds of tasks that were identified as necessary. This provided considerable analytical insight about how policies might be developed to ensure that these tasks were indeed performed and integrated into the costings. The approach extended the idea of “financial intermediation” and considered three additional forms of intermediation, namely technical intermediation, social intermediation and organisational intermediation.
Financial Intermediation involves putting in place all the elements of a financial package to build and operate a micro hydro plant (sometimes called “financial engineering”). It covers the transaction costs of administering loans, the assessment and assurance of the financial viability of schemes, assessment and assurance of the financial credibility of borrower, the management of guarantees, the establishment of collateral (“financial conditioning”) and the management of loan repayment. But it can also be used to cover whole schemes rather than just investment in an individual plant, and involves the “bundling” of projects together to make them attractive to finance agencies, establishing the supply of finance on a “wholesale” basis (from aid agencies, governments, development banks), and the mechanisms to convert it into a supply of retail finance (equity finance, and loan finance at the project level).
Technical Intermediation has involved the “upstream” work of improving the technical options by undertaking R and D, the importation of the technology and know-how, “down” through the development of the capacities to supply the necessary goods and services (site selection, system design, technology selection and acquisition, construction and installation of civil, electro-mechanical and electrical components, operation, maintenance, Trouble Shooting, overhaul and refurbishment).
Organisational Intermediation involved not only the initiation and implementation of the programmes, but also the lobbying for the policy change required to construct an “environment” in which micro hydro technology and the various players can thrive. This involves putting in place the necessary infrastructure, and getting the incentives right to encourage owners, contractors, and financiers.

6. The poverty impact of Micro Hydro:

Measuring the poverty impact of Micro hydro has recently been attempted by David Fulford, Paul Mosley and others in a study commissionned by the UK’s Department for International Development. As these authors point out, it is conceptually and empirically difficult to attribute measurable poverty impacts to relatively small investments, such as micro hydro, when there are so many other circumstances (such as climatic variation, and macro economic change) that affect the measurable poverty status of remote communities over any particular time period.
However, these researchers used a ‘second best’ approach, consisting of tracking, by partial equilibrium methods, the effects of micro-hydro on the incomes of the poor through changes in entrepreneurs’ incomes, labour incomes, consumer real incomes and backward and forward linkages. Following this approach the researchers found:
“in relation to the number of schemes in existence the poverty reduction performance of micro-hydro is impressive, particularly in Nepal and Ethiopia….micro-hydro is indeed a relatively efficient method of poverty reduction, in terms of costs per person moved across the poverty line. The poverty gap measure suggests that micro-hydro is also able to reach a number of the extremely poor….through the channel of wage employment in micro-hydro schemes themselves and linkage activities derived from those schemes. In addition, we believe that the estimates of poverty reduction from micro-hydro .. systematically understate poverty impact, as they exclude a range of very difficult to measure but important effects such as time savings from no longer having to carry kerosene or other fuel, improved education from the availability of electric light and improved health and agricultural production from drinking and irrigation water made available out of channels originally developed for micro hydro schemes.”
“On the preliminary data presented here, therefore, there would seem to be evidence enabling a poverty reduction case to be made for the promotion of micro-hydro, in particular through the policy instruments specified. Whether that indeed turns out to be the case depends on whether the estimates presented here can be validated by a broader range of data, both from the countries considered here and elsewhere”.[8]

Appendix

Nepal
A long standing programme based on the provision of subsidies to micro hydro through the Agricultural Development Bank of Nepal (ADBN).
The strategy was driven by NGOs and combined building up the capability of the local turbine manufacturers and the development of a number of technical improvements (the electronic load controller and the use of electric motors as turbines).
A significant part of the sector (turbines for milling grain) is financially self sustaining, and receives no subsidised support .
The current phase of the strategy involved the creation of The Alternative Energy Promotion Centre (AEPC ) in 1996 as an autonomous body under the Development Committee Act, and is overseen by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MST). The mandate of AEPC is to promote renewal energy technologies to meet the needs in rural areas of Nepal. DANIDA is assisting those elements of the programme that promote micro hydro development and PV).

Stream Line, Kenya

2008-04-14T09:56:00.000-07:00

- September 2002 -
Introduction
The absence of electric power greatly constrains a community's ability to generate income and provide local services. Decentralised energy options using local resources, such as wind, biogas, solar power and hydro power, offer many advantages for meeting the needs of rural populations. Development of one or more renewable energy options can improves both of these aspects of community life
Since the early 1990s, pico-hydro has been used to deliver electricity and mechanical power to remote mountainous areas of the world. Pico-hydro projects are hydroelectric schemes with a power generation capacity of up to 5 kilowatts (kW). The energy in water flowing down a slope is converted into electrical energy. Pico-hydro schemes have low power outputs, but require little water and are simple to install. They typically provide energy for lighting and battery charging.
Experts from the Energy Programme of ITDG East Africa, based in Kenya, in collaboration with Nottingham Trent University in the UK are working to develop the pico-hydro power sector in Kenya. The project demonstrates that pico-hydro technology is a sustainable and affordable technology for community electrification. Contributing to the establishment of hydro power infrastructure in rural Kenya and sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, the project benefits two rural communities in Kirinyaga District, central Kenya.

Water Power
The flow of water in rivers and streams is a potential source of energy. Hydro power is a very clean source of energy. It relies on a natural, non-polluting and renewable resource. Traditional water-wheels, used for providing energy for milling and pumping, have been superseded by modern turbines that are compact, highly efficient and capable of turning at high speed.
Hydro power has many advantages, including:

1. Power is usually available continuously on demand.
2. It is a concentrated energy source.
3. The energy available is predictable.
4. No fuel and limited maintenance are required, so running costs are low compared with diesel power.
5. It is a long-lasting and robust technology; systems can last for 50 years or more without major new investments.

Micro-hydro is the term used for technologies that convert energy in flowing water to direct-drive shaft power or to electricity generation on a very small scale. Ranging from a few hundred watts for battery charging or food processing applications up to 100 kW, micro-hydro provides power for small communities and rural industry in remote areas away from grid electricity. Hydro power that produces a maximum electrical output of 5 kW is called pico-hydro.

Pico-hydro Power
Recent innovations in pico-hydro technology have made it a source of power for some of the poorest and most remote regions in the world. It is a versatile power source as it can produce alternating current (AC) electricity, enabling standard appliances to be used, and it can be distributed to a whole village. It is used to power light bulbs, radios, televisions, refrigerators and food processors. It offers communities an alternative to the use of hazardous and expensive kerosene for lighting households, schools and businesses. Mechanical power can also be used with some designs to operate workshop tools and grain mills.

Pico-hydro has a number of advantages over larger systems.

-Smaller water flows are required and there are many more sites that are suitable.
-It is easier to establish and maintain agreements regarding ownership, payments, operation, maintenance and water rights, as the units only supply power for a small number of households.
-Even in countries with extensive grid electrification, pico-hydro can be suitable for the many small, remote communities for which grid extension would be extremely expensive and not practical.
-Locally manufactured systems can be produced that have much lower long- term costs per kilowatt than solar, wind and diesel systems.

Pico-hydro in Kenya
Kathamba and Thima, in the Kirinyaga District of Kenya, are the recipients of a pico-hydro scheme, the first of its kind in Africa, thanks to ITDG East Africa and Nottingham Trent University's Pico Hydro Unit. The success of the project is due to the availability of trained people and the support given by the local communities.
In Kathamba during the wet season, the spring produces 8 litres of water per second, generating approximately 1.7 kW to 2 kW of power. This is distributed to more than 30 households, with another 35 homes awaiting connection. The scheme in Thima covers 66 households. Each 'package' consists of light units and a socket for which users pay between US$55 and $75 to be connected to electricity. Fuel costs have dramatically reduced, with money saved each month on kerosene and dry cell batteries.

How Does it Work?
Water is diverted down a pipe, called the penstock, to fall through a vertical height or head, in order to gather energy. The lower end of the penstock is attached to a turbine that is turned by the energy in the falling water. As the turbine spins, it can be connected either directly to machines such as mills and presses or to a generator to provide electrical power for a small grid or battery charging. The amount of energy available is directly related to the volume of water flowing down the penstock and the height, through which it falls. The greater the volume of water and the greater the height, the more energy can be harnessed.

Figure 1. Components of a Pico-hydro System © Maher and Smith, 2001

There are eight main components to a pico-hydro system:

Water supply: The source of water is a stream or an irrigation channel. Small amounts of water can also be diverted from rivers. It is important that the source of water is reliable and not needed by anyone else. Springs make excellent sources as they do not dry up in dry weather and are usually clean, which stops silt building up in the system.

Forebay tank: Water is fed into a forebay tank. This is often enlarged to form a small reservoir. This can be useful if the water available is not enough during the dry season.

Penstock pipe: Water flows from the forebay tank or reservoir down a long pipe called the penstock. At the end of the penstock water comes out of a nozzle as a high- pressure jet. A drop or head of at least 20 metres is recommended and means that the amount of water needed to produce enough power for the basic needs of a village is quite small.

Turbine and generator: The power in the jet, or hydro power, is transmitted to a turbine runner that changes it into mechanical power. The runner has blades or buckets that cause it to rotate when struck by the water. The turbine is a general name that refers to the runner, nozzle and surrounding case. The runner typically spins 1500 times every minute. The turbine is attached to a generator. This converts rotating power into electrical power. This is how water flowing in a small stream can become electricity.

A pico generator

Electronic controller: An electronic controller is connected to the generator. This matches the electrical power that is produced to the electrical loads that are connected, and stops the voltage from changing as devices are switched on and off.

An electronic load controller

Mechanical load: The mechanical load is a machine connected to the turbine shaft using a pulley system so that power can be drawn directly from the turbine. The rotating force of the turbine runner can be used to turn equipment such as grain mills or woodwork machinery. Approximately 10 per cent of the mechanical power is lost in the pulley system but it is still an efficient way of using the power as none is lost in the generator or electric motor.

Distribution system: The distribution system connects the electricity supply from the generator to the houses or schools. This is often one of the most expensive parts of the system.

Electrical loads: Electrical loads are usually connected inside houses. This is a general name given to any device that uses the electricity generated. The type of loads connected to a pico-hydro scheme depends largely on the amount of power generated. Using the power wisely can add more benefits. Special lights such a fluorescent bulbs, for example, use less power and so more lights can be connected to the same generator.
After passing through the whole system, water is normally returned to a stream or river below the powerhouse.

Planning a Pico-hydro Scheme :

It is important to conduct a feasibility study in a proposed area to determine what is required to implement a pico-hydro project for village electrification.

Overview: Establish the demand, willingness to pay, local ability to manage a scheme, and grid electricity available or planned.

Location: A suitable geographical location for a pico-hydro scheme is one with steep rivers that have an all-year flow.

Demand survey: Estimate the number of houses within 1km (approximately two- thirds of a mile) from the water supply and those who are willing to pay. A 1km radius is the distance that electricity can most easily be transmitted.

Power estimate: The head and flow rate should both be measured to determine the possible power output and to help in choosing equipment.

Cost and availability: Estimate the size of generator needed to meet the energy demand, based on the head, flow and power outputs of available equipment. Typically, the higher the head the lower the cost per installed kilowatt. A typical system may cost approximately US$3,000 per kilowatt. The initial investment is high, but running costs, mostly maintenance, are low because there is no need to buy fuel.

Viability: Comparing the likely annual income with capital cost gives a rough guide to financial viability. If the annual income is less than 10 per cent of the capital cost, the project is not viable. If it is 10–25 per cent the scheme could be possible. If the annual income is more than 25 per cent, then the scheme is viable.

Head and flow: Decide on a suitable combination of head and flow to produce the required power. Assumptions should be made on the system efficiency, but if in doubt, assume an overall efficiency (water power to electrical power) of 45 per cent.

Village meeting: Present the findings of the survey to the community at an open meeting. Local government staff and local development organisations should be encouraged to attend.

Other steps: A number of other steps need to be taken, including a detailed site survey, finalising power output, producing a scale map and scheme layout, a detailed costing, consumer contracts for electricity supply and organising finance. Once this has been done the scheme can get under way. Ordering materials, installation and training can all be undertaken.

How to calculate power and efficiency

The pico-hydro project in Kenya has proven that this technology is both sustainable and affordable. Utilising a small spring to generate electricity, the communities of Kathamba and Thima now watch TV, listen to the radio and children can do homework at night knowing this technology is environmentally friendly. Money saved on buying kerosene and batteries can be used for other things, including children's education.

All photos © ITDG/Zul

Microhydro Electricity Basics

2008-04-12T06:09:00.000-07:00

Hydropower is based on simple concepts. Moving water turns a turbine, the turbine spins a generator, and electricity is produced. Many other components may be in a system, but it all begins with the energy already within the moving water.

Water power is the combination of head and flow. Both must be present to produce electricity. Consider a typical hydro system. Water is diverted from a stream into a pipeline, where it is directed downhill and through the turbine (flow). The vertical drop (head) creates pressure at the bottom end of the pipeline. The pressurized water emerging from the end of the pipe creates the force that drives the turbine. More flow or more head produces more electricity. Electrical power output will always be slightly less than water power input due to turbine and system inefficiencies.

Head is water pressure, which is created by the difference in elevation between the water intake and the turbine. Head can be expressed as vertical distance (feet or meters), or as pressure, such as pounds per square inch (psi). Net head is the pressure available at the turbine when water is flowing, which will always be less than the pressure when the water is turned off (static head), due to the friction between the water and the pipe. Pipeline diameter has an effect on net head.

Flow is water quantity, and is expressed as "volume per time," such as gallons per minute (gpm), cubic feet per second (cfs), or liters per minute (lpm). Design flow is the maximum flow for which your hydro system is designed. It will likely be less than the maximum flow of your stream (especially during the rainy season), more than your minimum flow, and a compromise between potential electrical output and system cost.

Measuring Head & Flow

Before you can begin designing your hydro system or estimating how much electricity it will produce, you´ll need to make four essential measurements:

• Head (the vertical distance between the intake and turbine)
• Flow (how much water comes down the stream)
• Pipeline (penstock) length
• Electrical transmission line length (from turbine to home or battery bank)

Head and flow are the two most important facts you need to know about your hydro site. You simply cannot move forward without these measurements. Your site´s head and flow will determine everything about your hydro system—pipeline size, turbine type, rotational speed, and generator size. Even rough cost estimates will be impossible until you´ve measured head and flow.

When measuring head and flow, keep in mind that accuracy is important. Inaccurate measurements can result in a hydro system designed to the wrong specs, and one that produces less electricity at a greater expense.

See also the following Home Power feature articles:

Microhydro-Electric Systems Simplified
Intro to Hydropower—Part 1: Systems Overview
Intro to Hydropower—Part 2: Measuring Head & Flow
Intro to Hydropower—Part 3: Power, Efficiency, Transmission & Equipment Selection

Microhydro-Electric System Types

Off-Grid Battery-Based Microhydro-Electric Systems

Most small off-grid hydro systems are battery-based. Battery systems have great flexibility and can be combined with other energy sources, such as wind generators and solar-electric arrays, if your stream is seasonal. Because stream flow is usually consistent, battery charging is as well, and it´s often possible to use a relatively small battery bank. Instantaneous demand (watts) will be limited not by the water potential or turbine, but by the size of the inverter.

The following illustration includes the primary components of any off-grid battery-based microhydro-electric system. See our Microhydro-Electric System Components section for an introduction to the function(s) of each component.

See also the following Home Power feature articles:

Hydro New England Style

Off-Grid Batteryless Microhydro-Electric Systems

If your stream has enough potential, you may decide to go with an AC-direct system. This consists of a turbine generator that produces AC output at 120 or 240 volts, which can be sent directly to standard household loads. The system is controlled by diverting energy in excess of load requirements to dump loads, such as water- or air-heating elements. This technique keeps the total load on the generator constant. A limitation of these systems is that the peak or surge loads cannot exceed the output of the generator, which is determined by the stream´s available head and flow. This type of system needs to be large to meet peak electrical loads, so it can often generate enough energy for all household needs, including water and space heating.

The following illustration includes the primary components of any off-grid batteryless microhydro-electric system. See our Microhydro-Electric System Components section for an introduction to the function(s) of each component.

Grid-Tied Batteryless Microhydro-Electric Systems

Systems of this type use a turbine and controls to produce electricity that can be fed directly into utility lines. These can use either AC or DC generators. AC systems will use AC generators to sync directly with the grid. An approved interface device is needed to prevent the system from energizing the grid when the grid is out of action and under repair. DC systems will use a specific inverter to convert the output of a DC hydro turbine to grid-synchronous AC. The biggest drawback of batteryless systems is that when the utility is down, your electricity will be out too. When the grid fails, these systems are designed to automatically shut down.

The following illustration includes the primary components of any grid-tied batteryless microhydro-electric system. See our Microhydro-Electric System Components section for an introduction to the function(s) of each component.

See also the following Home Power feature articles:

Powerful Dreams—Crown Hill Farm´s Hydro-Electric Plant

Microhydro-Electric System Components

Understanding the basic components of an RE system and how they function is not an overwhelming task. Here are some brief descriptions of the common equipment used in grid-intertied and off-grid microhydro-electric systems. Systems vary—not all equipment is necessary for every system type.

Intake
Pipeline
Turbine
Controls
Dump Load
Battery Bank
Metering
Main DC Disconnect
Inverter
AC Breaker Panel
Kilowatt-Hour Meter

Intake
AKA: screen, diversion, impoundment

Intakes can be as simple as a screened box submerged in the watercourse, or they can involve a complete damming of the stream. The goal is to divert debris- and air-free water into a pipeline. Effectively getting the water into the system´s pipeline is a critical issue that often does not get enough attention. Poorly designed intakes often become the focus of maintenance and repair efforts for hydro-electric systems.

A large pool of water at the intake will not increase the output of the turbine, nor will it likely provide useful storage, but it will allow the water to calm so debris can sink or float. An intake that is above the bottom of the pool, but below the surface, will avoid the grit on the stream bottom and most of the floating debris on top. Another way to remove debris is to direct the water over a sloped screen. The turbine´s water falls through, and debris passes with the overflow water.

Pipeline
AKA: Penstock

Most hydro turbines require at least a short run of pipe to bring the water to the machine, and some turbines require piping to move water away from it. The length can vary widely depending on the distance between the source and the turbine. The pipeline´s diameter may range from 1 inch to 1 foot or more, and must be large enough to handle the design flow. Losses due to friction need to be minimized to maximize the energy available for conversion into electricity. Plastic in the form of polyethylene or PVC is the usual choice for home-scale systems. Burying the pipeline is desirable to prevent freezing in extremely cold climates, to keep the pipe from shifting, and to protect it from damage (cows, bears, etc.) and ultraviolet (UV) light degradation.

Turbine
AKA: Waterwheel

The turbine converts the energy in the water into electricity. Many types of turbines are available, so it is important to match the machine to the site´s conditions of head and flow.

In impulse turbines, the water is routed through nozzles that direct the water at some type of runner or wheel (Pelton and Turgo are two common types). Reaction turbines are propeller machines and centrifugal pumps used as turbines, where the runner is submerged within a closed housing. With either turbine type, the energy of the falling water is converted into rotary motion in the runner´s shaft. This shaft is coupled directly or belted to either a permanent magnet alternator, or a "synchronous" or induction AC generator.

Controls
AKA: Charge controller, controller, regulator

The function of a charge controller in a hydro system is equivalent to turning on a load to absorb excess energy. Battery-based microhydro systems require charge controllers to prevent overcharging the batteries. Controllers generally send excess energy to a secondary (dump) load, such as an air or water heater. Unlike a solar-electric controller, a microhydro system controller does not disconnect the turbine from the batteries. This could create voltages that are higher than some components can withstand, or cause the turbine to overspeed, which could result in dangerous and damaging overvoltages.

Off-grid, batteryless AC-direct microhydro systems need controls too. A load-control governor monitors the voltage or frequency of the system, and keeps the generator correctly loaded, turning dump-load capacity on and off as the load pattern changes, or mechanically deflects water away from the runner. Grid-tied batteryless AC and DC systems also need controls to protect the system if the utility grid fails.

See also the following Home Power feature articles:

Under Control: Charge Controllers for Whole-House Systems
What is a Charge Controller?
Get Maximum Power From Your Solar Panels with MPPT
What The Heck? Charge Controller

Dump Load
AKA: diversion load, shunt load

A dump load is an electrical resistance heater that must be sized to handle the full generating capacity of the microhydro turbine. Dump loads can be air or water heaters, and are activated by the charge controller whenever the batteries or the grid cannot accept the energy being produced, to prevent damage to the system. Excess energy is "shunted" to the dump load when necessary.

Battery Bank
AKA: storage battery

By using reversible chemical reactions, a battery bank provides a way to store surplus energy when more is being produced than consumed. When demand increases beyond what is generated, the batteries can be called on to release energy to keep your household loads operating.

A microhydro system is typically the most gentle of the RE systems on the batteries, since they do not often remain in a discharged state. The bank can also be smaller than for a wind or PV system. One or two days of storage is usually sufficient. Deep-cycle lead-acid batteries are typically used in these systems. They are cost effective and do not usually account for a large percentage of the system cost.

See also the following Home Power feature articles:

Top 10 Battery Blunders and How to Avoid Them
Flooded Lead-Acid Battery Maintenance
Battery Box Basics

Metering
AKA: battery monitor, amp-hour meter, watt-hour meter

System meters measure and display several different aspects of your microhydro-electric system´s performance and status—tracking how full your battery bank is, how much electricity your turbine is producing or has produced, and how much electricity is being used. Operating your system without metering is like running your car without any gauges—although possible to do, it´s always better to know how well the car is operating and how much fuel is in the tank.

See also the following Home Power feature articles:

The Whole Picture: Computer-Based Solutions for PV System Monitoring
Mutichannel Metering: Beta-Testing a New System Monitor
Control Your Energy Use & Costs with Solar Monitoring

Main DC Disconnect
AKA: battery/inverter disconnect

In battery-based systems, a disconnect between the batteries and inverter is required. This disconnect is typically a large, DC-rated breaker mounted in a sheet-metal enclosure. It allows the inverter to be disconnected from the batteries for service, and protects the inverter-to-battery wiring against electrical faults.

See also the following Home Power feature articles:

What The Heck? Disconnect

Inverter
AKA: DC-to-AC converter

Inverters transform the DC electricity stored in your battery bank into AC electricity for powering household appliances. Grid-tied inverters synchronize the system´s output with the utility´s AC electricity, allowing the system to feed hydro-electricity to the utility grid. Battery-based inverters for off-grid or grid-tied systems often include a battery charger, which is capable of charging a battery bank from either the grid or a backup generator if your creek isn´t flowing or your system is down for maintenance.

In rare cases, an inverter and battery bank are used with larger, off-grid AC-direct systems to increase power availability. The inverter uses the AC to charge the batteries, and synchronizes with the hydro-electric AC supply to supplement it when demand is greater than the output of the hydro generator.

See also the following Home Power feature articles:

What’s Going On—The Grid? A New Generation of Grid-Tied PV Inverters
Off-Grid Inverter Efficiency

AC Breaker Panel
AKA: mains panel, breaker box, service entrance

The AC breaker panel, or mains panel, is the point at which all of a home´s electrical wiring meets with the provider of the electricity, whether that´s the grid or a microhydro-electric system. This wall-mounted panel or box is usually installed in a utility room, basement, garage, or on the exterior of a building. It contains a number of labeled circuit breakers that route electricity to the various rooms throughout a house. These breakers allow electricity to be disconnected for servicing, and also protect the building´s wiring against electrical fires.

Just like the electrical circuits in your home or office, a grid-tied inverter´s electrical output needs to be routed through an AC circuit breaker. This breaker is usually mounted inside the building´s mains panel. It enables the inverter to be disconnected from either the grid or from electrical loads if servicing is necessary. The breaker also safeguards the circuit´s electrical wiring.

Kilowatt-Hour Meter
AKA: KWH meter, utility meter

Most homes with grid-tied microhydro-electric systems will have AC electricity both coming from and going to the utility grid. A multichannel KWH meter keeps track of how much grid electricity you´re using and how much your RE system is producing. The utility company often provides intertie-capable meters at no cost.

-By Paul Cunningham & Ian Woofenden

micro-hydro power plant

2008-04-12T04:10:00.000-07:00

The Border Green Energy Team (BGET) provides hands-on appropriate technology training and financial support to village innovators in ethnic minority areas on both sides of the Thai/Burma border.

Waterfall

School in need of electricity

Students

Preparing reservoir

Working on dam

Everybody works

More sandbags

Piping water from good height to get good pressure

Good effort

Pressure, OK?

Let's build a POWER HOUSE

Preparing cement

For the turbine

Break time

Power Hut may be

Here comes the water

Into the turbine

Where is the manual?

Water comes in; Water goes out and in between ....

The truth: Voltage meter and Current meter

Controller

Controller

Looking good

Cable works for distribution

No sagging cables

Higher

One village at a time

Bright class-room

Bir Bahadur Ghale

2008-04-11T12:52:00.000-07:00

Bir Bahadur Ghale
Country: Nepal
Region: Asia
Field Of Work: Economic Development
Subsectors: Appropriate Technology,
Rural Development
Target Populations: Businesses,
Communities
Organization: Nepal Micro-Hydro Entrepreneur's Federation
Year Elected: 2004

This profile was prepared when Bir Bahadur Ghale was elected to the Ashoka Fellowship in 2004.
Villages in the highest altitudes of the Himalayan Mountains face isolation and economic stagnation. As a result, they lose dozens of young people every year to increasingly crowded urban areas. Bir Bahadur Ghale electrifies these villages with a small hydropower plant and helps them attract new business ventures that stimulate their economies and draw young people back to their communities.

The New Idea:
The best way to stem the tide of people leaving remote villages is to fill those villages with energy and opportunity. Bir Bahadur Ghale accomplishes this by constructing micro-hydropower plants, just large enough to light a town and support a wave of new businesses. In linking sustainable power generation to industrial and commercial ventures, he creates jobs that enable villagers to buy electricity and revive their failing villages.

As he builds micropower plants throughout Nepal, Bir Bahadur makes sure that each one has the support it needs to run smoothly. On a practical level, he establishes district service centers to answer technical questions and make needed repairs. To support power management, he has founded the Nepal Micro-Hydropower Entrepreneurship Federation, connecting hundreds of plant managers to trainings and idea exchanges, and uniting them to advocate for rural development in national policy.

The Problem:
The rural villages and towns of Nepal have almost no access to electricity. While the national power grid covers much of the plains and urban areas of the country, it does not yet reach these communities, home to more than 85 percent of Nepal’s population. The absence of a managed power source in these communities makes commercial or industrial ventures impossible on all but the most limited of scales. With little access to urban economies, rural families survive on meager subsistence farming.

Nepal’s intricate network of steep rivers and streams makes hydropower a solution with excellent potential for addressing rural energy needs. Legislation supporting micro-hydropower projects raised hopes for new progress in rural electrification during the 1980s. Nearly 1,400 micro-hydropower plants have been established since then, but many are now on the verge of closure due to improper management and technical failures. Negligence and lack of long-term planning have kept hydropower from meeting its great potential, wasting valuable and scarce resources on power projects that are never used.

Without power, opportunity for social and economic advancement remains outside the reach of most rural residents. The situation pushes rural villagers to move away from their homes, searching for work in urban areas and other countries. The result has been a mass exodus that strains the resources of cities as it tears the social fabric of rural communities.

The Strategy:
In 1991, Bir Bahadur built a micro-hydropower plant in his hometown of Barpak, providing enough power to electrify every household in the village. He spent weeks convincing his neighbors of the benefits of electricity, preparing the way for a remarkably quick expansion of his power network. The laborers who built the plant, mostly from poor families, were the first to have electric light. Bir Bahadur and his team lit the streets a few weeks later, and within months allowed electric access to the great majority of farms and houses of the village. For every household in the village, electricity gave cheaper, easier and cleaner lighting than old kerosene lamps.

Bir Bahadur tied his energy generation closely to the development of industrial and commercial ventures in the village. He attracted outside businessmen and trained local entrepreneurs to use electricity to spur economic growth. A paper business, a saw mill, and a furniture factory all emerged and provided new employment for the young people of the village. Bir Bahadur recruited investors to establish a bakery that provided fresh bread at a cheaper rate than villagers had previously paid for two-day-old bread brought from the nearest settlement. With these successes, migration away from the village decreased, and many people who had previously moved to the cities came back to join their families.

Encouraged by the rapid growth of his network in Barpak, Bir Bahadur quickly adapted his methods to serve other communities. He designed feasibility studies and outreach programs to inform villagers about the benefits of electricity for home use, and about the business opportunities that electricity can support. The programs were effective; over the past decade he has led the construction of 22 hydropower plants in five districts across Nepal. He founded the Barpak Service Center to give technical advice, perform needed repairs, and generally keep the plants running smoothly.

Bir Bahadur has partnered his plant construction projects with ropeways that can carry needed goods up the steep Himalayan slopes that separate rural villages. His first ropeway, connecting Barpak to the markets of Rangrung, greatly reduced the time that villagers had to spend carrying basic necessities to their town; trips that used to take 5 hours now take only 20 minutes. Bir Bahadur sees a great potential for ropeways in the mountainous terrain of Nepal, and plans to expand them to transport people soon. The triple partnership of hydropower plants, new business ventures and ropeways has opened tremendous possibilities for improving quality of life in rural communities.

To help other hydropower advocates achieve similar success, Bir Bahadur established the Nepal Micro-Hydropower Entrepreneurship Federation in 2002. Where the 1,400 micro-hydropower plants spread across Nepal have traditionally struggled with technical and management problems, the federation provides a common platform for sharing experiences and solutions. It unites its members in the common purpose of developing community-owned, independent sources of energy for rural villages and towns. Experienced entrepreneurs help spread awareness of hydropower and support new communities as they launch their own projects. In the process, they train newer network members to take leadership roles in their home districts. As federation members gain experience, Bir Bahadur helps them lobby the government for policy level changes, specifically advocating clear rules for micro-hydropower users and investors.

Bir Bahadur has set an ambitious goal for his federation: to bring electricity to all eligible villages in Nepal by 2014. His work has already spread to all fifteen villages in the district of Gorkha, as well as towns in five other districts. He sees a logical and simple next step to spread his model throughout Nepal, and to neighboring countries with similar terrain.

The Person:
Bir Bahadur Ghale is from the village of Barpak in the Gorkha district, with a population of approximately 6,000 people. Agriculture is the mainstay of the Barpak economy, and those males who do not pursue agriculture often join the armed forces of India, Singapore, and Britain (which once included service in Hong Kong). Bir Bahadur resolved from an early age to follow a different career path. He attended high school in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, but always aspired to return and contribute to the development of his hometown.

In 1986 Bir Bahadur went on a trip to Hong Kong. He was dazzled by the cosmopolitan city and noticed how vital an influence electricity had on the way of life there. Hong Kong was driven by electricity. The underground metro, the tramway, cable cars, elevators—almost everything was powered by electricity. He imagined how life in Hong Kong would change if electricity ceased to exist. The bustling city would tear apart. He thus realized that electricity is a critical commodity.

While working as a petty contractor for the construction of a highway in 1989, Bir Bahadur stopped by a village hotel, noticing to his surprise that in the middle of the mountains this hotel had working electric power. Investigating, he found that the energy came from a simple water turbine at a nearby mill. He thought of his home village, 1,900 meters high in the mountains, a two- to three-day walk from the nearest settlement. Without power, his neighbors lived a difficult life cut off from the basic amenities and infrastructure available to city residents. Facing many challenges, he built and established the 50-kilowatt micro-hydropower plant in his village in 1991. The plant was small, but it was enough to light all households in Barpak village. Since then, through combining demand-driven electricity generation with ropeway transportation, he has transformed the economy of the village. This process has provided new alternatives for the youth of his town, and for the future of rural communities in general.
source:http://ashoka.org/node/2750

Picture worth 1000 words

2008-04-11T05:45:00.000-07:00

source:http://www.rise.org.au/info/Tech/hydro/large.html

Energy Crisis in Nepal

2008-04-06T09:19:00.000-07:00

"Not sure what is going on in Nepal. Just left and there were epci lines
for petrol all over the place. 8 hours a day of no electricity.Makes for very interesting travel. People are wonderful. Don't be scared!"

Nepal's electricity

2008-04-06T09:08:00.000-07:00

Nepal does have one resource in abundance: water. And its neighbours are looking to exploit that resource to power their economies with hydroelectricty. Meanwhile Nepal is left suffering an energy crisis and regular blackouts. But China and India hold sway over Nepal... politically and economically. And as Matt McClure reports Nepal's new government may end up serving its neighbours' interests ahead of its own.

36 hrs power cut/ week

2008-04-06T08:35:00.000-07:00

Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) announced 36 hours of power cut each week from today. NEA had increased the load shedding hours from six hours to fifteen hours a week. ANA Jan 10 08

Hydro power and Nepal

2008-04-06T08:28:00.000-07:00

Interview with Indian ambessador.

Run time:9min 45 sec

Chernobyl Uncencensored

2008-04-06T08:22:00.000-07:00

Runtime: 1 hr 33 min

I still remember the unfortunate event of the '86. I remember myself worried about what will happen to me and my younger brother because someone told me the milk-bar ice cream that we just had used milk from Chernobyl and we have been RADIOACTIVATED. That was an international terror and I can somewhat hardly imagine what Ukraine and its neighboring countries went through.

Hydro Power

2008-03-17T10:32:00.000-07:00

Instead of using steam to drive generator turbines, a hydro plant uses the force of falling or flowing water.
Hydro power has been used to make electricity in the Midwest since the early 1900s, with many facilities built by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.
There are two types of hydroelectric power plants:

A high-head plant takes advantage of the force of falling water. Large-scale facilities like the Hoover Dam and Grand Coulee Dam are examples of high-head hydro plants. Dams are built along major rivers to create reservoirs; the utility controls the flow of water through the dam in response to the demand for electricity.
A run of the river plant, like those found in the Midwest, relies on the flow of the river to spin the turbines. These plants produce a much smaller amount of electricity.
The benefits of hydro power are many: no hazardous emissions or solid waste, no fuel costs and it's entirely sustainable. Hydro plants are reliable, low maintenance and provide flood control.

Drawbacks to hydro power :

Environmental groups have pointed out the drawbacks to hydroelectric power, especially from large-scale dams and reservoirs. The most dramatic is the impact on wildlife - the reservoirs can alter water temperature and prevent the migration of fish.
While "run of the river" hydro plants have a much smaller environmental impact, their use is constrained by the lack of control. The electricity produced at these plants cannot be increased or decreased according to demand, and the flow of the river is dependent on the area's precipitation.
Many of the nation's hydroelectric plants are aging, and flooding in recent years has irreparably damaged several in the Midwest. The initial costs of building or replacing a hydro plant are high, and usually not cost-effective in the Midwest, so most utilities are investing in other forms of renewable energy.

Everyday in Nepal.

2008-03-17T09:49:00.000-07:00

Everyday at a different, unknown time the electricity throughout all of Nepal simply blacks out. Most of Nepal’s energy (maybe all) comes from hydroelectric power, and during the dry season, October through May, there is neither enough dams nor water to power the country. Everyone knows of this as load shedding, which does exactly that: sheds the load on Nepal’s electrical grid. For a country trying to develop itself, losing power 3-4 hours a day (sometimes more) certainly does not help their industry or productivity in any way. Newspapers talk of many solutions, from nuclear energy to more dams, but all solutions require excessive amounts of money that Nepali’s do not have. Above, Sita cooks in the dark. Obviously, unlit cooking happens everywhere, but in a major metropolitan area, in a middle class home? Yea, weird.
Coupled with an absence of electricity, petrol has become a much sought after commodity. The past weeks have seen indefinite strikes in an area known as the Terai, mainly the southern half of Nepal. These strikes are linked to one of Nepal’s many ethnic groups, the Madeshi, feeling left out of the political process. In fact, they feel so underrepresented in the fledgling political sphere, they want their own country. These strikes, or “Bandahs” in Nepali, are situated along the Nepal-Indian border where a majority of Nepal’s imports, including petrol, cross into the country. As a result, and at least in Kathmandu (I haven’t been or seen it anywhere else), long lines form at the limited number of petrol pumps around the city.
Inextricably linked to the border stand-offs, the supply of kerosene, used for cooking and the heating of people homes, has not escaped the bamboozling turbulence. More long lines, more waiting, and as can always be predicted: the distributor runs out. People walked home with empty jugs, just as they sometimes walk away without fuel in their gas tank. What amazes me is these people simply shrug their shoulders and walk away. (notice they have coca-cola and an ipod, but still empty jugs)
My first 3 days in Kathmandu there was another bandah in the city proper. Tires were burned in the streets, people shouted passionately, and all businesses and traffic were shut down. Unfortunately, I was very green and didn’t have the courage to take any pictures. This bandah was pointed at the government and their announcement to raise fuel prices. After 3 days of screwball shenanigans (the tires smelled terrible, some busses were destroyed with bricks), the government reneged the original price hike, much to the people’s happiness. Following the analysis of these events, I’ve concluded absolutely nothing. Economically speaking, prices for fuel go up. Simple. The people of Nepal are very poor. Complicated. Looking at things socially complicates it even further. No fuel for heat, for cooking, or for day-to-day business, not only exasperates poverty, it creates poverty.
http://www.eyeini.com/eyeini

Hoftun wishes for Nepal

2008-03-14T13:11:00.000-07:00

Odd Hoftun, a hydropower engineer from Norway, came to Nepal in 1958 to build Tansen Hospital and later set up Butwal Technical School. Hoftun was back in Kathmandu recently and talked to Nepali Times about lessons learnt in hydropower development in Nepal.

Nepali Times: You were here in 1990 when the Jana Andolan I took place. Do you get a sense of déjà vu?

Odd Hoftun: The things I have seen in Nepal have overwhelmed me. Kathmandu is overcrowded and growing beyond its limits. I was visiting Butwal, and it is also a changed place. Many of these changes are positive. I am an optimist. I don’t see things going backwards in Nepal. One does wish, however, that certain things would move quicker.

Nepali Times: What lessons has Nepal learnt, or not learnt, about hydropower in the last 17 years?

Odd Hoftun: We have learnt that hydropower development takes time, but also requires a lot of investment. It takes realistic planning, and big projects are simply unrealistic. My philosophy has been to start small and grow over time. Changes in legislation have been very favourable. Some infrastructure has been developed. Opening up to the private sector was unthinkable 20 years ago, but this has now become what many people think of as a solution. The introduction of small hydropower schemes has proved that this it is one way in which hydropower can be developed in Nepal. If you add up all the micro-plants, there is quite a lot of capacity even with them.
There was a time when people used to think only foreign investors and foreign experts could develop hydropower in Nepal. We know that is no longer true because Nepal now has the capability and resources to handle these things. Companies like Himal Hydro, Nepal Hydro and Electric, and Butwal Power Company all started as small companies. Today they have grown and become internationally competitive.
What is still lacking is an understanding from the government on how to work with the private sector. There has to be an element of trust. It seems to me that there’s scope for private investment also in power distribution. Whatever the private sector is doing in hydropower, or in power distribution, there’s an urgent need for a realistic and predictable government framework. It shouldn’t be that one minister says one thing, then another comes in and says something else.

Nepali Times: Can politics be blamed?

Odd Hoftun: They say people get the politicians they deserve, so I wouldn’t blame them. I can’t come here and offer a prescription for how things should be done. I would just like to say that one must be realistic, there must be trust, and there must be consistency over the years. There was a time when I thought the Melamchi water project should become a public-private enterprise. The government was supportive of the idea, but when outside financing institutions got involved the idea was dropped. I was sorry about that because it could have been a multi-purpose regional development model so that not just the city people would benefit.

Nepali Times: Is the Indian market a blessing or a curse?

Odd Hoftun: It can be both. One must look 20 years ahead to make something like that work. The potential is tremendous. In Nepal, big hydropower projects are much talked about, but no one is even thinking about transmission lines across the border or within the country. It is difficult for private parties to run the grid. India is in desperate need of clean energy and Nepal can provide it. That said, just because there is demand in India, doesn’t mean Nepal should rush into big projects. In some places the small hydro concept is ideal. Ultimately, however, these small power plants need to be connected to the grid, which is why they are good for rural development. The big projects take a long time to start, and the rush upsets the local economy. Big projects should and must be undertaken, but that is only possible through export to India. However, there has to be a fair agreement and a very high level of trust between the two nations for something like that to work.

Nepali Times: How would you advise the Norwegian government about investing in Nepali hydropower?

Odd Hoftun: We have hydropower in Norway that has been developed, while in Nepal it is just starting. This is the time for Norway to invest in Nepal. There are many qualified and experienced Nepali people in the legal, financial and technical fields who can take care of Nepali interests. So Nepal would be an ideal partner for cooperation from the Norwegian side.

Small Hydro Power

2008-03-14T12:44:00.001-07:00

For a small hydro system to work, all you need to do is simply harness the energy of continual running water with a turbine, and convert this energy into either DC or AC electricity. Small hydro power systems are classified as mini, small, and micro depending on the capacity of the plant. There are already many villages in India and Nepal that have access to small hydro electricity.
Record shows that small hydro power was introduced in India in 1897 during the time of British colonization. Various cases have been reported which say the small hydro power installed during the early 1900s are still in good condition and functioning properly. Only after Independence did India start working extensively on Small Hydro Power under Five-Year plans. With the effort made by MNES (Ministry of Non-conventional Energy Sources) during the period of the Eighth Five-Year plan, Small hydro was upgraded and additional funds allocated for improvement and expansion. The total installed capacity of small hydro projects in India is 144.28 mw while another 241.87 mw is under construction.
In India, the Hilly Hydro Project funded by United Nations Development Programme–Global Environment Facility have shown considerable amount of interest in the sector in 13 Himalayan states. Many demonstration project on the use of small hydro power for lighting, heating, cooking, irrigation, and small industry have been carried out in the 13 states to check deforestation trends. Various social and technical aspects namely, geography, people, end-use, head, flow, and total power generated have been considered. With the lending operations funded primarily by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility, the Asia Alternative Energy Program (ASTAE) has assisted with the design of mini-hydro components. 15 small hydro schemes representing 68 MW of capacity are under operation in India.
Nepal being a country of rural and isolated committees, the suitability of micro-hydro systems is distinctly visible. The government of Nepal has great plans to increase the mega Hydro Power generation, and has shown almost the same amount of interest in developing small hydro power, but the policy toward small hydro is not very clear yet. Basically, there are foreign-aided projects that support the development of the power sector in Nepal, including the development of mini- and small hydro resources. Recently, some initiatives have been taken by facilitating Kathmandu University with programs for small hydro power research. In India, Alternative Hydro Energy Centre, set up by ministry of Non-conventional Energy Resources in the year 1982, at the University of Roorkie, Roorkie, has been working for the cooperation in small hydro power research and technology transfer, project design, development and consultancy services.
Both in India and Nepal, small hydro power plants has been considered for rural electrification. This has helped to reduce dependence on fuel wood, generate small enterprises and uplift the rural economy. Nepal is second only to Brazil in terms of hydro power. Nepal has numerous rivers, so there is further prospect of small hydro power in Nepal. The availability of water beyond 4000 meters of height has made permanent settlement possible. At such great heights, one of the most economical means to make electricity available is through the use of small hydro plants.
Small hydro has proved to be very advantageous in both India and Nepal. Micro-hydro has been very helpful in saving trees in the rural parts of both the countries. In addition, small hydro has been instrumental in enhancing economic development and living standards especially in remote areas with limited or no electricity both in India and Nepal. Ghandruk Power Plant in small village Ghandruk in the Annapurna region of Nepal, provides electricity to all houses for lighting purposes. Lodges (usualy meant for foreign tourists) and households have electricity for cooking. Since it is cost-effective, time-saving, and labor-saving, lodge-keepers are very positive about it and are ready to maintain it for ever. They have been able to make good profit out of it. There has been an increase in the local incomes in the Annapurna region. Employment opportunities to people were created when village electrification committee was established to oversee the project. Also when Forest Management Committee regulated some laws regarding the protection of forests, local people benefitted with better employment opportunities. Economic structure has changed and is way too different from many of the rural communities of Nepal. Revenue generated from the households and lodges is used for the village development. It has enhanced the interest of local manufacturers in manufacturing devices out of locally available materials.
Micro-Hydro systems are preferable from an environmental point of view as seasonal river flow patterns downstream are not affected and there is no flooding of valleys upstream of the system. Because of the fact that the motion of the river operates the machine, a complex mechanical governor system is not required, which reduces costs and maintenance requirements. The systems can be build locally at low cost, and the simplicity gives rise to better long term reliability. Dry season, and the lack of storage of excess power generated can be hazardous though.
The future of small hydro power both in India and Nepal is bright. India can provide consultancy services in number of areas of small hydro power like planning, investigation and hydro resource survey, engineering designs for construction works, techno-economic analysis of small hydro power, to name a few. With more private sector participation, the chances of improvement are very high. Even without it, it is likely that there will be a shift in the prority to small hydro projects considering the environmental consequences of large hydro projects, the fragile geology and active seismicity of the region, and the high costs associated with the large hydro projects.

(source:http://web.grinnell.edu/courses/ant/S00/ANT154-01/magar/Hydro.html)

How Power Grids Work?

2008-03-12T17:31:00.000-07:00

Electrical power is a little bit like the air you breathe: You don't really think about it until it is missing. Power is just "there," meeting your every need, constantly. It is only during a power failure, when you walk into a dark room and instinctively hit the useless light switch, that you realize how important power is in your daily life. You use it for heating, cooling, cooking, refrigeration, light, sound, computation, entertainment... Without it, life can get somewhat cumbersome.

Power travels from the power plant to your house through an amazing system called the power distribution grid.

Power grid distribution lines can be above or under ground. See more power grid pictures.

The grid is quite public -- if you live in a suburban or rural area, chances are it is right out in the open for all to see. It is so public, in fact, that you probably don't even notice it anymore. Your brain likely ignores all of the power lines because it has seen them so often. In this article, we will look at all of the equipment that brings electrical power to your home. The next time you look at the power grid, you will be able to really see it and understand what is going on!

The Power Plant Electrical power starts at the power plant. In almost all cases, the power plant consists of a spinning electrical generator. Something has to spin that generator -- it might be a water wheel in a hydroelectric dam, a large diesel engine or a gas turbine. But in most cases, the thing spinning the generator is a steam turbine. The steam might be created by burning coal, oil or natural gas. Or the steam may come from a nuclear reactor like this one at the Shearon Harris nuclear power plant near Raleigh, North Carolina:

No matter what it is that spins the generator, commercial electrical generators of any size generate what is called 3-phase AC power. To understand 3-phase AC power, it is helpful to understand single-phase power first.

Photo courtesy U.S. Department of Energy
A breakdown of the major power plants in
the United States, by type

The Power Plant: Alternating Current

Single-phase power is what you have in your house. You generally talk about household electrical service as single-phase, 120-volt AC service. If you use an oscilloscope and look at the power found at a normal wall-plate outlet in your house, what you will find is that the power at the wall plate looks like a sine wave, and that wave oscillates between -170 volts and 170 volts (the peaks are indeed at 170 volts; it is the effective (rms) voltage that is 120 volts). The rate of oscillation for the sine wave is 60 cycles per second. Oscillating power like this is generally referred to as AC, or alternating current. The alternative to AC is DC, or direct current. Batteries produce DC: A steady stream of electrons flows in one direction only, from the negative to the positive terminal of the battery.

AC has at least three advantages over DC in a power distribution grid:

Large electrical generators happen to generate AC naturally, so conversion to DC would involve an extra step.
Transformers must have alternating current to operate, and we will see that the power distribution grid depends on transformers.
It is easy to convert AC to DC but expensive to convert DC to AC, so if you were going to pick one or the other AC would be the better choice.

The power plant, therefore, produces AC. On the next page, you'll learn about the AC power produced at the power plant. Most notably, it is produced in three phases.

The Power Plant: Three-phase Power

The power plant produces three different phases of AC power simultaneously, and the three phases are offset 120 degrees from each other. There are four wires coming out of every power plant: the three phases plus a neutral or ground common to all three. If you were to look at the three phases on a graph, they would look like this relative to ground:

There is nothing magical about three-phase power. It is simply three single phases synchronized and offset by 120 degrees.

Why three phases? Why not one or two or four? In 1-phase and 2-phase power, there are 120 moments per second when a sine wave is crossing zero volts. In 3-phase power, at any given moment one of the three phases is nearing a peak. High-power 3-phase motors (used in industrial applications) and things like 3-phase welding equipment therefore have even power output. Four phases would not significantly improve things but would add a fourth wire, so 3-phase is the natural settling point.

And what about this "ground," as mentioned above? The power company essentially uses the earth as one of the wires in the power system. The earth is a pretty good conductor and it is huge, so it makes a good return path for electrons. (Car manufacturers do something similar; they use the metal body of the car as one of the wires in the car's electrical system and attach the negative pole of the battery to the car's body.) "Ground" in the power distribution grid is literally "the ground" that's all around you when you are walking outside. It is the dirt, rocks, groundwater, etc., of the earth.

Transmission Substation

The three-phase power leaves the generator and enters a transmission substation at the power plant. This substation uses large transformers to convert the generator's voltage (which is at the thousands of volts level) up to extremely high voltages for long-distance transmission on the transmission grid.

A typical substation at a power plant

You can see at the back several three-wire towers leaving the substation. Typical voltages for long distance transmission are in the range of 155,000 to 765,000 volts in order to reduce line losses. A typical maximum transmission distance is about 300 miles (483 km). High-voltage transmission lines are quite obvious when you see them. They are normally made of huge steel towers like this:

All power towers like this have three wires for the three phases. Many towers, like the ones shown above, have extra wires running along the tops of the towers. These are ground wires and are there primarily in an attempt to attract lightning.

The Distribution Grid

For power to be useful in a home or business, it comes off the transmission grid and is stepped-down to the distribution grid. This may happen in several phases. The place where the conversion from "transmission" to "distribution" occurs is in a power substation. A power substation typically does two or three things:

It has transformers that step transmission voltages (in the tens or hundreds of thousands of volts range) down to distribution voltages (typically less than 10,000 volts).
It has a "bus" that can split the distribution power off in multiple directions.
It often has circuit breakers and switches so that the substation can be disconnected from the transmission grid or separate distribution lines can be disconnected from the substation when necessary.

A typical small substation

The box in the foreground is a large transformer. To its left (and out of the frame but shown in the next shot) are the incoming power from the transmission grid and a set of switches for the incoming power. Toward the right is a distribution bus plus three voltage regulators.

The transmission lines entering the substation and passing through the switch tower

The switch tower and the main transformer

Now the distribution bus comes into the picture.

Distribution Bus

The power goes from the transformer to the distribution bus:

In this case, the bus distributes power to two separate sets of distribution lines at two different voltages. The smaller transformers attached to the bus are stepping the power down to standard line voltage (usually 7,200 volts) for one set of lines, while power leaves in the other direction at the higher voltage of the main transformer. The power leaves this substation in two sets of three wires, each headed down the road in a different direction:

The wires between these two poles are "guy wires" for support. They carry no current.

The next time you are driving down the road, you can look at the power lines in a completely different light. In the typical scene pictured on the right, the three wires at the top of the poles are the three wires for the 3-phase power. The fourth wire lower on the poles is the ground wire. In some cases there will be additional wires, typically phone or cable TV lines riding on the same poles.

As mentioned above, this particular substation produces two different voltages. The wires at the higher voltage need to be stepped down again, which will often happen at another substation or in small transformers somewhere down the line. For example, you will often see a large green box (perhaps 6 feet/1.8 meters on a side) near the entrance to a subdivision. It is performing the step-down function for the subdivision.

Regulator Bank

You will also find regulator banks located along the line, either underground or in the air. They regulate the voltage on the line to prevent undervoltage and overvoltage conditions.

A typical regulator bank

Up toward the top are three switches that allow this regulator bank to be disconnected for maintenance when necessary:

At this point, we have typical line voltage at something like 7,200 volts running through the neighborhood on three wires (with a fourth ground wire lower on the pole):

Taps

A house needs only one of the three phases, so typically you will see three wires running down a main road, and taps for one or two of the phases running off on side streets. Pictured below is a 3-phase to 2-phase tap, with the two phases running off to the right:

Here is a 2-phase to 1-phase tap, with the single phase running out to the right:

--->

At the House

And finally we are down to the wire that brings power to your house! Past a typical house runs a set of poles with one phase of power (at 7,200 volts) and a ground wire (although sometimes there will be two or three phases on the pole, depending on where the house is located in the distribution grid). At each house, there is a transformer drum attached to the pole, like this:

In many suburban neighborhoods, the distribution lines are underground and there are green transformer boxes at every house or two. Here is some detail on what is going on at the pole:

The transformer's job is to reduce the 7,200 volts down to the 240 volts that makes up normal household electrical service. Let's look at this pole one more time, from the bottom, to see what is going on:

There are two things to notice in this picture:

There is a bare wire running down the pole.
This is a grounding wire. Every utility pole on the planet has one. If you ever watch the power company install a new pole, you will see that the end of that bare wire is stapled in a coil to the base of the pole and therefore is in direct contact with the earth, running 6 to 10 feet (1.8 to 3 m) underground. It is a good, solid ground connection. If you examine a pole carefully, you will see that the ground wire running between poles (and often the guy wires) are attached to this direct connection to ground.
There are two wires running out of the transformer and three wires running to the house.
The two from the transformer are insulated, and the third one is bare. The bare wire is the ground wire. The two insulated wires each carry 120 volts, but they are 180 degrees out of phase so the difference between them is 240 volts. This arrangement allows a homeowner to use both 120-volt and 240-volt appliances. The transformer is wired in this sort of configuration:

The 240 volts enters your house through a typical watt-hour meter like this one:

The meter lets the power company charge you for putting up all of these wires.

Safety Devices: Fuses

Fuses and circuit breakers are safety devices. Let's say that you did not have fuses or circuit breakers in your house and something "went wrong." What could possibly go wrong? Here are some examples:

A fan motor burns out a bearing, seizes, overheats and melts, causing a direct connection between power and ground.
A wire comes loose in a lamp and directly connects power to ground.
A mouse chews through the insulation in a wire and directly connects power to ground.
Someone accidentally vacuums up a lamp wire with the vacuum cleaner, cutting it in the process and directly connecting power to ground.
A person is hanging a picture in the living room and the nail used for said picture happens to puncture a power line in the wall, directly connecting power to ground.

When a 120-volt power line connects directly to ground, its goal in life is to pump as much electricity as possible through the connection. Either the device or the wire in the wall will burst into flames in such a situation. (The wire in the wall will get hot like the element in an electric oven gets hot, which is to say very hot!). A fuse is a simple device designed to overheat and burn out extremely rapidly in such a situation. In a fuse, a thin piece of foil or wire quickly vaporizes when an overload of current runs through it. This kills the power to the wire immediately, protecting it from overheating. Fuses must be replaced each time they burn out. A circuit breaker uses the heat from an overload to trip a switch, and circuit breakers are therefore resettable.

The power then enters the home through a typical circuit breaker panel like the one above.

Safety Devices: Circuit Breakers

Inside the circuit breaker panel (right) you can see the two primary wires from the transformer entering the main circuit breaker at the top. The main breaker lets you cut power to the entire panel when necessary. Within this overall setup, all of the wires for the different outlets and lights in the house each have a separate circuit breaker or fuse:

If the circuit breaker is on, then power flows through the wire in the wall and makes its way eventually to its final destination, the outlet.

What an unbelievable story! It took all of that equipment to get power from the power plant to the light in your bedroom.

The next time you drive down the road and look at the power lines, or the next time you flip on a light, you'll hopefully have a much better understanding of what is going on. The power distribution grid is truly an incredible system. http://science.howstuffworks.com/power.htm/printable

Generating Electricity using

2008-03-11T08:38:00.000-07:00

Battery & GeneratorElectricity starts with electrons. In many materials, the electrons are tightly bound to the atoms. Wood, glass, plastic, ceramic, air, cotton ... These are all examples of materials in which electrons stick with their atoms. Because the electrons don't move, these materials cannot conduct electricity very well, if at all. These materials are electrical insulators.

But most metals have electrons that can detach from their atoms and move around. These are called free electrons. Gold, silver, copper, aluminum, iron, etc., all have free electrons. The loose electrons make it easy for electricity to flow through these materials, so they are known as electrical conductors. They conduct electricity. The moving electrons transmit electrical energy from one point to another.
Electricity needs a conductor in order to move. There also has to be something to make the electricity flow from one point to another through the conductor. One way to get electricity flowing is to use a generator.

Using a battery: Using a battery, a fuel cell or a solar cell to produce electricity, there are three things that are always the same:
The source of electricity will have two terminals: a positive terminal and a negative terminal.

The source of electricity (whether it is a generator, battery, etc.) will want to push electrons out of its negative terminal at a certain voltage. For example, a AA battery typically wants to push electrons out at 1.5 volts.
The electrons will need to flow from the negative terminal to the positive terminal through a copper wire or some other conductor. When there is a path that goes from the negative to the positive terminal, you have a circuit, and electrons can flow through the wire.
You can attach a load of any type (a light bulb, a motor, a TV, etc.) in the middle of the circuit. The source of electricity will power the load, and the load will do its thing (create light, spin a shaft, generate moving pictures, etc.).
Electrical circuits can get quite complex. But at the simplest level, you always have the source of electricity (a battery, etc.), a load (a light bulb, motor, etc.), and two wires to carry electricity between the battery and the load. Electrons move from the source, through the load and back to the source.

Using a generator:A generator is a simple device that moves a magnet near a wire to create a steady flow of electrons.
One simple way to think about a generator is to imagine it acting like a pump pushing water along. Instead of pushing water, however, a generator uses a magnet to push electrons along. This is a slight over-simplification, but it is nonetheless a very useful analogy.
There are two things that a water pump can do with water:

A water pump moves a certain number of water molecules.
A water pump applies a certain amount of pressure to the water molecules.

In the same way, the magnet in a generator can:

push a certain number of electrons along
apply a certain amount of "pressure" to the electrons

In an electrical circuit, the number of electrons that are moving is called the amperage or the current, and it is measured in amps. The "pressure" pushing the electrons along is called the voltage and is measured in volts. So you might hear someone say, "If you spin this generator at 1,000 rpm, it can produce 1 amp at 6 volts." One amp is the number of electrons moving (1 amp physically means that 6.24 x 1018 electrons move through a wire every second), and the voltage is the amount of pressure behind those electrons.

AC vs. DC

2008-03-11T08:34:00.000-07:00

Batteries, fuel cells and solar cells all produce something called direct current (DC). The positive and negative terminals of a battery are always, respectively, positive and negative. Current always flows in the same direction between those two terminals.
The power that comes from a power plant, on the other hand, is called alternating current (AC). The direction of the current reverses, or alternates, 60 times per second (in the U.S.) or 50 times per second (in Europe, for example). The power that is available at a wall socket in the United States is 120-volt, 60-cycle AC power.
The big advantage that alternating current provides for the power grid is the fact that it is relatively easy to change the voltage of the power, using a device called a transformer. By using very high voltages for transmitting power long distances, power companies can save a lot of money. Here's how that works.
Let's say that you have a power plant that can produce 1 million watts of power. One way to transmit that power would be to send 1 million amps at 1 volt. Another way to transmit it would be to send 1 amp at 1 million volts. Sending 1 amp requires only a thin wire, and not much of the power is lost to heat during transmission. Sending 1 million amps would require a huge wire.
So power companies convert alternating current to very high voltages for transmission (e.g. 1 million volts), then drop it back down to lower voltages for distribution (e.g. 1,000 volts), and finally down to 120 volts inside the house for safety. It is a lot harder to kill someone with 120 volts than with 1 million volts.

War of Currents

2008-02-28T08:05:00.000-08:00

In the "War of Currents" era (sometimes, "War of the Currents" or "Battle of Currents") in the late 1880s, George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison became adversaries due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the alternating current (AC) advocated by Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla.

During the initial years of electricity distribution, Edison's direct current was the standard for the United States and Edison was not disposed to lose all his patent royalties. Direct current worked well with incandescent lamps that were the principal load of the day, and with motors. Direct current systems could be directly used with storage batteries, providing valuable load-levelling and backup power during interruptions of generator operation. From his work with rotary magnetic fields, Tesla devised a system for generation, transmission, and use of AC power. He partnered with George Westinghouse to commercialize this system. Westinghouse had previously bought the rights to Tesla's polyphase system patents and other patents for AC transformers from Lucien Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs.

Several undercurrents lay beneath this rivalry. Edison was a brute-force experimenter, but was no mathematician. AC cannot really be understood or exploited without a substantial understanding in mathematics and mathematical physics, which Tesla had. Tesla had worked for Edison but was undervalued (for example, when Edison first learned of Tesla's idea of alternating-current power transmission, he dismissed it: "[Tesla's] ideas are splendid, but they are utterly impractical."). Bad feelings were exacerbated because Tesla had been cheated by Edison of promised compensation for his work. Edison would later come to regret that he had not listened to Tesla and used alternating current.

(source: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

First Hydro Power Plant 1882

2008-02-28T05:18:00.000-08:00

When you look at rushing waterfalls and rivers, you may not immediately think of electricity. But hydroelectric (water-powered) power plants are responsible for lighting many of our homes and neighborhoods. On September 30, 1882, the world's first hydroelectric power plant began operation on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin. The plant, later named the Appleton Edison Light Company, was initiated by Appleton paper manufacturer H.F. Rogers, who had been inspired by Thomas Edison's plans for an electricity-producing station in New York.

Unlike Edison's New York plant which used steam power to drive its generators, the Appleton plant used the natural energy of the Fox River. When the plant opened, it produced enough electricity to light Rogers's home, the plant itself, and a nearby building. Hydroelectric power plants of today generate a lot more electricity. By the early 20th century, these plants produced a significant portion of the country's electric energy. The cheap electricity provided by the plants spurred industrial growth in many regions of the country. To get even more power out of the flowing water, the government started building dams.

In 1933, the U.S. government established the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which introduced hydroelectric power plants to the South's troubled Tennessee River Valley. The TVA built dams, managed flood control and soil conservation programs, and more. It greatly boosted the region's economy. And this development happened in other places as well. Soon, people across the country were enjoying electricity in homes, schools, and offices, reading by electric lamp instead of candlelight or kerosene. New electricity-powered technologies entered American homes, including electric refrigerators and stoves, radios, televisions, and can openers. Today, people take electricity for granted, not able to imagine life without it.

source:http://www.americaslibrary.gov

testing

2008-02-06T12:13:00.001-08:00

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