Hydropower
Basics
Written by: Phil Davis, Managing Director at Renewables First and specialist in hydropower, wind power and solar power system design.
Reviewed by the Renewables First engineering team for technical accuracy.
Reviewed June 2026
Hydropower is one of the most established and reliable forms of renewable energy, using flowing water to generate electricity. While the core principles are simple, designing a viable system requires a detailed understanding of site conditions, engineering constraints, and environmental considerations.
At Renewables First, we have worked on a wide range of hydropower projects across the UK, from early-stage feasibility assessments through to detailed system design and planning support. This experience informs the guidance in this learning centre.
This page explains the fundamental concepts behind hydropower, including how energy is generated, what makes a site suitable, and the key technical factors that influence system performance.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Hydropower?
The amount of energy generated depends mainly on two factors:
the volume of water available (flow)
the vertical drop between water levels (head)
Hydropower systems can range from small run-of-river schemes powering individual properties to larger installations supplying electricity to the grid.
How do hydropower systems work?
There are lots of different types of hydropower turbines that will work on different combinations of head and flow. Fundamentally all hydro systems work on the same principle of converting the pressure in a head of water into rotary mechanical power, and then use a generator to turn the mechanical power into electricity.
Typical low-head micro hydro system
The pictures show a typical low-head micro hydro system with the main parts identified. Although the pictures show tiny systems (less than 10 kW) it is easier to explain the parts on smaller systems because they are all so close together. The basic parts are the same for any hydro system of any size. Working from the upstream-side and working downstream, the first thing the water flows into is the intake. The intake always has a screen which has two important purposes, firstly to prevent debris from entering the hydro system that could block and/or damage the hydro system and secondly to prevent fish from entering the system which could cause them injury.
Once the water has passed through the intake screen it flows through the penstock pipe to the turbine. The penstock is a pressure-pipe, which means that it is 100% full of water and as it moves downwards the water pressure inside the pipe increases as the head increases.
The Hydro Turbine has a a rotor to turn high-pressure water into rotational mechanical energy
At the end of the penstock pipe is the turbine which has a rotor to turn the high-pressure water into rotational mechanical energy. The turbine discharges the water at the lowest possible level to maximise the head across the system, and normally uses a ‘draft tube’ to do this.
The draft tube a clever device that is full of water, and much like you have to reduce the air pressure inside your mouth to suck water up a straw, by having a column of water inside a draft tube that always wants to fall downwards because of gravity, it creates a negative pressure underneath the turbine. This is called ‘suction head’ because it is a negative pressure, whereas the pressure in the penstock is positive and called ‘pressure head’. Draft tubes don’t mean you can get more head from a site, but they do allow you to physically locate the turbine up above the downstream water level, which can make it much easier to construct and maintain because it won’t be in such a wet environment.
Low-speed, high-torque mechanical power from the turbine is changed to high-speed, low-torque power by increasing the speed using a belt-drive or a gearbox
The mechanical rotational energy produced by the hydro turbine is not much use to people nowadays, but historically would have been used to directly power mill stones to grind flour or looms to make cloth. Nowadays we want electricity, so normally the low-speed, high-torque mechanical power from the turbine is changed to high-speed, low-torque power by increasing the speed using a belt-drive or a gearbox.
The high-speed low-torque power is then used to drive a generator which converts the mechanical power from the turbine into useful electricity that we can all use. Depending on how the system is configured, the electricity could be used on-site instead of importing electricity from the grid, or it could be exported and sold to the grid, or often a combination of the two.
What are head & flow work in relation to hydropower?
If you have a prospective site, it helps to understand the hydropower fundamentals of head and flow.
What is head?
Diagram of measuring head at high head hydropower site
Hydropower all comes down to head and flow. The amount of power, and therefore energy that you can generate is proportional to the head and the flow.
Head is the change in water levels between the hydro intake and the hydro discharge point. It is a vertical height measured in metres. The two diagrams below show how the head would be measured on a typical ‘low head’ and a typical ‘high head’ site. The more head you have the higher the water pressure across the hydro turbine and the more power it will generate. Higher heads are not only better because they generate more power, but also because the higher water pressure means you can force a higher flow rate through a smaller turbine, and because turbine cost is closely related to physical size, higher-head turbines often cost less than their low-head cousins even though they might generate the same power.
Higher head also means a faster rotating turbine and generator, which means lower torque.
The cost of drive train is closely related to how much torque it has to transmit, so higher heads = less torque = less cost.
Diagram of measuring head at a low head hydropower site
Of course you only have what you have, so if your site only has 2 ½ metres of head you won’t be able to increase this significantly. However, even small increases in head can make a difference.
Sometimes it is possible to clear silt or re-grade a tailrace or discharge channel to lower the downstream water levels slightly which increases the overall head at the site. Or it may be possible to raise the water level on the upstream side by raising weir crests or sluices, though this must be done carefully to avoid increasing flood risk, and sometimes requires the construction of new spillways or installation of fail-safe tilting weirs to ensure that flood risk isn’t increased during extreme flood events.
Generally speaking the cost of even small increases in head at low-head sites is repaid hundreds of times over from increased energy production for the next few decades, so is always worth the effort.
What is flow?
The flow rate and how it varies over a year is the next and equally important parameter.
The simplest way to characterise the flow in a watercourse is to work out what the long-term annual mean flow is. This is important because it is the overall average flow in a watercourse that is important; it doesn’t matter if it is a raging torrent after heavy rains (all watercourses are…) because in the big scheme of things we only have really heavy rains for a few days or weeks a year, and for the other 50 weeks when it is lightly raining, drizzling or bright summer sunshine you would still want you hydro system to be working and generating energy.
The fundamental piece of information that characterises the flow in a watercourse is the flow duration curve. Although simple once you understand them, they are quite complicated to newcomers. Figure 1 below shows the long-term flow duration curve of a small river in Somerset.
Figure 1 – Long-term flow duration curve for the River Yeo in Somerset.
Long-term flow duration curve for the River Yeo in Somerset
The y-axis is the flow rate in m3/s (metres-cubed per second), or sometime in litres per second for smaller watercourses. When the flow duration curve is constructed all of the flow rate data is sorted into descending order, then the highest flow rates are plotted on the left of the curve, then progressively lower flow rates to the right until the very lowest flow is plotted at the extreme left-hand end. The x-axis is the ‘percentage exceedence’. This is normally the difficult part to understand… For a given percentage exceedence it shows the flow rate equalled or exceeded for that percentage of time. For example, if you look at the 50% percentage exceedence on Figure 1 and read off the flow rate at that point you will see that it is 1.1 m3/s. This doesn’t mean that the flow rate in the watercourse is 1.1 m3/s for 50% of the year, it means that the flow rate is 1.1 m3/s or more for 50% of the year. The or more is important because it is clear from the shape of the curve that apart from the instant that the line crosses the 50% mark it is always more than 1.1 m3/s.
The x-axis is always plotted as a percentage exceedence from 0 to 100%. This is so that any data set spanning any interval can be plotted. The data set may span 10 days or more likely several decades of data from a local river gauging station. Generally speaking flow duration curves present long-term annual data, so the flow rates read off them are the annual flow characteristics. The percentage exceedences are often called ‘Q values’, so Q95 is the flow rate exceeded for 95% of a year and Q10 the flow exceeded for 10% of the year. The data set can also be analysed using a spreadsheet to work out the average (arithmetic mean) of all of the flows, and this is called Qmean. In the UK the Qmean is normally somewhere between Q25 and Q30, and in the case of Figure 1 is Q26.5.
Once you understand how a flow duration curve is constructed it can tell you a great deal about the flow characteristics of the water course. Firstly you can work out the Qmean, which is the average flow, and often if you are negotiating with the environmental regulator you will be discussing the Q95 flow, as this is often used as the representative ‘low flow’ that must always flow in any depleted stretches of river while the main volume of water passes through the hydro turbine.
By comparing different Qvalues you can see how ‘flashy’ a watercourse is, or whether it has a high baseflow. The flow duration curve in Figure 1 has a Qmean of 2.54 m3/s and a Q95 of 0.32 m3/s, so the Q95 is 8% of the Qmean. This is typical for a ‘flashy’ river that rises and falls quickly in response to rain because the rain runs straight of the land and into the river without getting stored in bogs or porous rocks before flowing into the river sometime later.
If you make the same comparison using Figure 2, you will see that the Qmean is 11.30 m3/s and the Q95 5.83 m3/s. In this case Q95 is 52% of the Qmean. This would be a ‘high baseflow’ river, typical of the rivers that flow in Hampshire with chalk catchments where the chalk stores the rain in its porous structure and then releases it to the rivers slowly and over a long period of time, rather like a sponge. It is also interesting to note that Qmean is at Q41; much lower on the flow duration curve than a flashy river like in Figure 1.
Figure 2 – Long-term flow duration curve for the River Test in Hampshire.
Long-term flow duration curve for the River Test in Hampshire
In both flow duration curves you can see that the red line is heading steeply upwards at the left-hand end of the graph. This is the ‘extreme flow’ region, which is not much use for energy generation because such extreme flows occur for a relatively small proportion of the year, but they are very important when designing a hydropower systems to ensure that the hydro structures and turbine house don’t get flooded, or even worse, washed away during the next major storm!
What is the minimum head and flow required?
The answer to this depends very much on what return on your investment you want.
For a commercially viable site it would normally need to be at least 25 kW maximum power output. For a low-head micro hydropower system you would need at least 2 metres of gross head and an average flow rate of 2.07 m3/s. To put this in context this would be a small river that was approximately 7 metres wide and around 1 metre deep in the middle.
For a site with 25 metres head a much lower average flow rate of 166 litres / second would be needed. This would be a large stream of 2 – 3 metres width and around 400 mm deep in the middle.
It is technically possible to develop smaller hydropower sites with lower power outputs, but the economics start to get challenging. This is particularly true for low-head sites; when the head drops to 1.5 metres it isn’t normally possible to get any kind of return on investment, though the site could still be technically developed using Archimedean screws or modern waterwheels.
The table below shows the average flow rates needed for a range of heads from 2 metres to 100 metres for system with 100, 50, 25, 10 and 5 kW maximum power outputs. 25 kW would normally be considered the minimum for a commercial project, though a 10 kW system can still produce an acceptable return if the civil engineering works are simple (hence don’t cost much). 5 kW systems are not normally viable, but the figures are shown for interest and may be useful for sites that can generate value from non-tangible benefits such as attracting visitors or positive publicity.
| Maximum Power Output (kW) | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | 10 | 25 | 50 | 100 | |
| Head (m) | Flow required (m3/sec) | ||||
| 2 | 0.340 | 0.680 | 1.699 | 3.398 | 6.796 |
| 5 | 0.136 | 0.272 | 0.680 | 1.359 | 2.718 |
| 10 | 0.068 | 0.136 | 0.340 | 0.680 | 1.359 |
| 50 | 0.014 | 0.027 | 0.070 | 0.136 | 0.272 |
| 100 | 0.006 | 0.014 | 0.034 | 0.068 | 0.136 |
Minimum flow rates required for a range of (gross) heads.
What is head?
Head is the height difference between where the water enters the hydro system and where it leaves it
What is head? Head is the height difference between where the water enters into the hydro system and where it leaves it, measured in metres. Typically this could be the height of a weir at the turbine entrace or if the site is undeveloped it would be between where the hydro intake screen would be and where the water discharges from the turbine and returns to the watercourse.
With hydropower it is very important to get as much head as you possibly can, as more head means more power (and energy) for not much more cost and therefore higher return on investment. Depending on how much flow you have, the minimum amount of head required for a viable hydro system varies. If you have low head and low flow, then installing a hydro system won’t be very cost effective. Typically a head in excess of 2 metres is the absolute minimum requirement, but more is much better.
What is flow?
What is flow? Put simply, this is the amount of water that can be passed through the turbine, measured in cubic meters per second. Obviously flow varies throughout the year (and between years) based on how much rainfall and sunshine we have. The maximum hydro system flow rate is normally based on the long-term average flow rate in the watercourse.
Calculating the long-term average (or ‘mean flow’) is complicated and forms a significant part of our feasibility studies and involves analysing the nearest long-term data from the environmental regulator’s closest flow gauging station and modelling the catchment using specialist hydrological modelling software. Flow data for sites is always presented as a Flow Duration Curve.
We are often asked whether flow rates can be measured on-site, which they can, but this only tells you the flow rate at one particular instant. The important issue is the long-term average and how the flows vary about this, from extreme draught and extreme flood events, and this requires many years of data and a great deal of modelling. There is one exception: on-site measurements can be useful for high-head, low-flow sites where it is realistic to install a small gauging weir.
What is the minimum head and flow I need?
Firstly you always want as much head as possible, and more is always better. Assuming you’ve maximised the head you then need enough flow to make it economically viable, then more is always better due to the economies of scale from building larger systems. It is the combination of minimum head and flow that determine the power output.
The following table gives indicative minimums – but remember more is always better. The table shows the minimum annual mean (i.e. average) flow rate required for a given head to generate a maximum power output of 25 kW, which as discussed here is considered the smallest economically viable hydropower system. Any more flow for the same head will generate more power, and there is no upper limit.
minimum head and flow
See here for more information on how to calculate the power output from the head and flow available at your site.
How long do hydropower systems last ?
Hydro systems have very long operational lives. The oldest operating hydropower systems are over 100 years old, including some utility-scale systems up in Scotland. Hydro turbines by their nature are relatively low-stressed pieces of machinery and operate under very steady loading conditions with no sudden load changes. This lends itself to a long life provided they are regularly maintained (mainly lubricating the bearings).
The civil engineering infrastructure should last almost indefinitely provided it is maintained. The drive systems (gearboxes or belts) will require periodic oil changes/replacement along with bearings in all of the rotating machinery. Most hydro hardware manufacturers quote design lives of 25 years, though this is normally because they have to set a figure, and in many cases the same manufacturers have many turbines out in the field that are over 50 years old and still operating reliably and efficiently.
Can I generate electricity from a fast flowing river without a fall?
In theory it is possible to generate electricity from a fast flowing river without a fall but the amount of energy available is very small in comparison to sites where the head (fall) of water is at least 2 metres. It is the combination of head and flow that maximise the potential to generate energy from a river not just fast flowing water.
There are a few products out there that claim to work with no head and just relying on fast flowing water, but at a small scale these just don’t make any kind of economic sense, hence we do not design or recommend schemes of this sort. If you are considering generating electricity from a fast flowing river within a fall of water please tread very carefully because there are some very questionable products with irrational performance claims in this market segment and do your research carefully.
How long will a hydro project take from initial concept to final operation ?
There are quite a number of stages to a hydropower project including the following:
- Hydropower feasibility study
- Distribution network grid connection consultation / permission
- Environmental licensing
- Local authority planning permission
- Outline and detailed civils and electrical design
- Turbine procurement
- Civils construction
- Site installation and hydropower system commissioning
Due to how long it takes to secure the environmental consents (normally 9 – 18 months) and the long lead-time on the hydro turbine (normally 6 – 12 months), plus of course the substantial amount of engineering design work and construction time, hydro projects tend to take between 2 and 4 years to complete.
For a typical 100 kW hydro power project without site specific complications it would be reasonable to assume a project duration of three years, broken down as shown on the project timeline chart below.
Hydropower project duration
Our experienced project managers will provide a detailed site specific project timeline plan for your site should it reach detailed design and construction phase so you can understand the project timeline in detail and will ensure the project is completed as quickly as possible.
What is a Flow Duration Curve?
The Flow Duration Curve is one of the most fundamental pieces of information that feeds into the design of a hydropower project, so for anyone that wants to understand the how’s and why’s of hydropower design, understanding the flow duration curve is a good place to start.
The easiest way to understand the Flow Duration Curve is to construct one from scratch. Firstly let’s assume you have suitable equipment to measure the flow in a river for ten days. Each day you go out and record the flow and at the end of the period have a list of flow rates like this:
| Date | Flow Rate |
|---|---|
| April 1st | 0.25 m3/s |
| April 2nd | 0.40 m3/s |
| April 3rd | 1.60 m3/s |
| April 4th | 1.00 m3/s |
| April 5th | 0.60 m3/s |
| April 6th | 4.50 m3/s |
| April 7th | 3.00 m3/s |
| April 8th | 2.40 m3/s |
| April 9th | 1.90 m3/s |
| April 10th | 1.30 m3/s |
Although useful, this doesn’t really help much, and with any table of data it is often better represented as a graph. If the flow rates are plotted as a bar-chart, the result is called a hydrograph and shows how the flow rate varied over a period of time, as shown below.
Hydrograph showing how flow rate varies over time
Although the hydrograph makes it easier to see the extremes of high and low flows, it is still quite difficult to see what happened in-between. For this you need a Flow Duration Curve.
To construct a Flow Duration Curve, rather than list the data in date order it is listed in order of the size of the flow rate, from highest to lowest. The data table would now look like this:
| Date | Flow Rate |
|---|---|
| April 6th | 4.50 m3/s |
| April 7th | 3.00 m3/s |
| April 8th | 2.40 m3/s |
| April 9th | 1.90 m3/s |
| April 3rd | 1.60 m3/s |
| April 10th | 1.30 m3/s |
| April 4th | 1.00 m3/s |
| April 5th | 0.60 m3/s |
| April 2nd | 0.40 m3/s |
| April 1st | 0.25 m3/s |
Next, and one of the trickier concepts to grasp if this is the first time you’ve worked with a Flow Duration Curve, is that rather than plotting the flow rates against a date, they are plotted against a ‘percentage exceedence’ scale. In our example there are ten flow rates, and the percentage exceedence scale will go from 0% to 100%, so each percentage exceedence increment will be 100% divided by the number of data points, so in this case 100% divided by 10 = 10 percentage exceedence points. This can be added to the table above to show at what percentage exceedence each flow rate occurred.
| Flow Rate | Percentage Exceedence |
|---|---|
| 4.50 m3/s | 10% |
| 3.00 m3/s | 20% |
| 2.40 m3/s | 30% |
| 1.90 m3/s | 40% |
| 1.60 m3/s | 50% |
| 1.30 m3/s | 60% |
| 1.00 m3/s | 70% |
| 0.60 m3/s | 80% |
| 0.40 m3/s | 90% |
| 0.25 m3/s | 100% |
This data can then be plotted and a smoothed line drawn between each data point to produce the Flow Duration Curve shown below.
Flow Duration Curve
This is now a Flow Duration Curve. If you look at the flow value at ‘60% exceedence’ you will see that it is 1.3 m3/s. This does not mean that the flow rate is 1.3 m3/s for 60% of the time, but that the flow is equalled or exceeded for 60% of the time, so basically the flow is at this flow or at a higher flow for 60% of the time. If you look at the flow at 20% exceedence it is 3 m3/s; this is a higher flow rate, so the flow is only at or greater than this flow rate for a smaller proportion of the year. If you look at 100% exceedence, it is 0.25 m3/s, which is the lowest flow rate recorded, so by definition the flow in the river is at this flow rate or more for 100% of the time.
It is a strange concept but an important one to grasp. Flow rate is often referred to as ‘Q’, and the exceedence value as a subscript number, so Q95 means the flow rate equalled or exceeded for 95% of the time. Qmean is often discussed, and this is the average or mean flow rate, and is the arithmetic mean of all of the flow points in the data set (in our example this is 1.695 m3/s) and normally occurs between Q20 and Q40 on the FDC, depending on how ‘flashy’ or ‘steady’ the river being analysed is.
The example above is based on ten flow rates over a ten day period. In the ‘real world’ we would construct a FDC using thousands of data points measured over many years or even decades. It is important to use full-years of data to make sure you don’t have a wet winter period included without the corresponding dryer summer to balance the resulting FDC.
Flow rates between Q0 and Q10 are considered high flow rates, and Q0 to Q1 would be extreme flood events. It is important that hydropower systems are designed to cope with such extreme flows. Flows from Q10 to Q70 would be the ‘medium’ range of flows and you would want your hydropower system to operate efficiently right across these flow rates. Flow rates from Q70 to Q100 are the ‘low flows’ when hydropower systems will just be operating but at a low power output, and as you move further to the right on the FDC hydro systems will begin to shut down due to low flow. As flow rates move from Q95 towards Q100 you move into the low-flow draught flows.
Is it worth using a variable speed generator for hydropower, or a variable-speed Archimedean Screw?
People often ask this and the answer is generally not, unless the system is an Archimedean Screw because you would only see a benefit if the head varied a lot at the site.
This is because if the head varies the velocity of the water through the turbine varies, and if the turbine blades are to operate at maximum efficiency the rotational speed of the turbine must be adjusted slightly to compensate. For many sites head variations are not significant enough to be an issue, though they can be on very low-head sites where the downstream water level can increase during higher flow periods. Even then, the impact needs to be significant because the extra benefits from variable-speed operation have to outweigh the extra electrical losses in the generator – inverter/rectifier – inverter chain that is required, and also the additional capital costs of the equipment.
Variable speed generator use for wind systems are common, but this is because the equivalent of the head varying in hydro for wind is the wind speed varying, which clearly happens constantly. Therefore wind turbines get a significant performance benefit from variable-speed operation.
The only caveat required is Archimedean Screws. Archimedean Screws are ‘gravity machines’ like overshot and breastshot waterwheels, so there is no need to align a turbine blade to the oncoming flow at an optimum angle. However, they do have to be able to vary the flow rate through themselves which is most efficiently achieved by varying the rotational speed of the screw, hence making it a variable-speed screw. The alternative is a fixed-speed screw with an inlet sluice gate which raises and lowers to adjust the flow rate through the screw, but this creates significant head losses, particularly at low flows. A secondary but significant benefit of variable-speed screws is that they do not suffer from the ‘back-slapping’ noise that is common to fixed-speed screws and in bad cases has led to noise abatement orders being served. For these reasons Renewables First would always recommend using a variable-speed Archimedean Screw.
What is the physical size of hydropower systems?
Once again it is difficult to make generalisations about the physical size of hydropower systems. Low-head hydropower systems take up much more space than high-head hydropower systems because the turbine has to be physically large to get a higher flow rate through it with only a low water pressure across the turbine. On smaller (<25 kW) systems it is possible to not have a turbine house and instead have a steel-fabricated turbine enclosure with a weatherproof cladding.
Penstock pipework is normally buried, so is out of sight and doesnt affect the size of hydropower systems. On low-head sites the intake and discharge channels can be covered over and turf laid, so are effectively invisible. Even though penstock pipes and channels can be invisible when the system is finished, bear in mind the size of the excavations required during the construction phase.
The table below gives indicative dimensions for the main system parts to give you an idea of turbine house sizes, diameters of pipes and cross sectional areas of channels and intake screens. In this example ‘low-head’ is assumed to have a net head of 2.5 metres and ‘high-head’ 50 metres.
| Low-head Hydropower Sites | High-head Hydropower Sites | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Max. Power Output | Turbine House Footprint | Intake Channel Area | Intake Screen Area | Turbine House Footprint | Penstock Pipe Diameter |
| 5 kW | 6 m2 | 1 m2 | 2 m2 | 2 m2 | 0.125 metres |
| 25 kW | 16 m2 | 3 m2 | 6 m2 | 4 m2 | 0.28 metres |
| 50 kW | 20 m2 | 6 m2 | 12 m2 | 5 m2 | 0.40 metres |
| 100 kW | 36 m2 | 12 m2 | 24 m2 | 9 m2 | 0.56 metres |
| 250 kW | 64 m2 | 30 m2 | 60 m2 | 16 m2 | 0.90 metres |
What is the difference between micro, mini and small hydro power plants?
Micro, mini and small hydro – What is the difference? The size designations for hydropower plants are a little misleading because, for example, a ‘mini’ hydro system could actually produce enough electricity for a thousand ‘average’ UK homes, which by most people’s standards is quite large! This anomaly in terminology has come about because hydropower really developed as a major large-scale energy producer so the designations were relative to very large ‘Gigawatt scale’ hydropower. There also isn’t a worldwide agreed definition, but the table below shows the most widely accepted categories. The table also shows the number of ‘average’ UK homes electrical energy needs met to put things in context.
| Hydro Category | Power Range | No. of Homes Powered |
|---|---|---|
| Pico | 0 kW – 5 kW | 0 – 5 |
| Micro | 5 kW – 100 kW | 5 – 100 |
| Mini | 100 kW – 1 MW | 100 – 1,000 |
| Small | 1 MW – 10 MW | 1,000 – 10,000 |
| Medium | 10 MW – 100 MW | 10,000 – 100,000 |
| Large | 100 MW+ | 100,000+ |
Strictly speaking Renewables First operates in the micro hydro and mini hydro categories, so from 5 kW to 1 MW power output, though because so many people refer to this scale of hydro as ‘small’ we also use this designation a lot.
Phil Davis
Manging Director | Renewables First
About the Author
Phil has worked in the renewables sector since 2001 and founded Hydro Generation, which became Renewables First in 2009.
A qualified mechanical engineer (BEng, MSc Renewable Energy Systems), Phil is a recognised expert in hydropower, wind and solar PV across all project stages.
Are you considering a hydropower project ?
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The first step to develop any hydropower site is to conduct a full feasibility study.
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