Hydro sites
The first stage in building a hydropower plantis to find a suitable site. This
may appear obvious, but it is important to realise that hydropower is site
specific. Not only does it depend on a suitable site being available but the
nature of the project will depend on the topography of the site. You cannot
have a hydropower plant without a suitable place to construct it. In the
case of large hydro projects (>10 MW in capacity), sites will often be a long
way from the place where the power is to be used, necessitating a major
transmission proiect too.
‘A hydropower project requires a river. The energy that can be taken
from the river will depend on two factors, the volume of water flowing,
and the drop in riverbed level, normally known as the head of water, that
canbe used. A steeply flowing river will yield more electricity than a sluggish
one of similar size.
‘This does not mean that slow-flowing rivers are not suitable for hydro-
power development. They often provide sites that are cheap and easy
to exploit. In contrast, steeply flowing rivers are often in inaccessible re
where exploitation is difficult.
Some sites offer the potential for the generation of thousands of
megawatts of power. Probably the largest of these is on the Congo river
where a multiple barrage development capable of supporting up to
35,000 MW could be installed. This is exceptionally large; most are smaller.
Fyen so, such sites are likely to be extremely expensive to develop and in
the current climate, extremely sensitive. They are also likely to be multi-
purpose projects involving flood control, irrigation, fisheries and recreational
usage as well as electricity generation.
How does one set about locating a hydropower site? Many countries have
carried out at least cursory surveys of the hydropower potential within
their territory and provisional details of suitable sites are available from the
water or power ministries. Sometimes much more detailed information is
available but this cannot replace an on-site survey. Indeed surveys carried
out as part of a feasibility study form a integral of any hydropower scheme.Dams and barrages
Once a site for a hydropower scheme has been identified, there are nor-
mally two ways of exploiting it. The first is to build a dam and create a
reservoir behind it from which water is taken to drive hydraulic turbines in
the project’s powerhouse. The second, called a run-of-river scheme, does
without a reservoir, though it will usually involve some sort or barrage.
Instead it takes water directly from the river to the powerhouse where
the turbines are installed.
Run-ol-river project
Arun-of-river scheme is the simplest and cheapest hydropower project to
develop. Since it requires no dam, a major constructional cost is avoided.
Impulse turbines
The main type of impulse turbine in use today is the Pelton turbine,
patented by the American engineer Lester Allen Pelton in 1889. It is found
mainly in applications where a high head of water is available, Another
type, called the Turgo turbine, has also been developed, again for high-
head applications. In both cases, the head of water will normally be greater
than 430 m, although the Pelton turbine is applicable for heads of between
200 and 1000m. (For heads higher than 1000m there will probably be two
turbines, each exploiting half the head.)Ahigh head of water will generate an enormous pressure atits base. If the
water is released through a narrow nozzle, the pressure of water will gener-
ate a fierce jet of water. The impulse turbine harnesses this energy of motion.
The Pelton turbine has bucket-shaped blades. The high-pressure jet of
water is directed into the buckets at an angle that ensures that the energy
in the water is virtually all converted into rotary motion of the turbine
wheel. This conversion process can achieve an efficiency of nearly 95%,
under ideal conditions, so little energy is wasted.
One of the keys to the operation of an impulse turbine is that it must
rotate in the air. If it becomes submerged, its rotation is hampered. This is
in direct contrast to the second type of turbine, the reaction turbine, which
must be submerged to operate efficiently.
Reaction turbines
For heads of water below 450m, a reaction turbine will be the normal
choice. This type of turbine must be completely submerged to operateHydropower turbines: (a) Pelton (b) Francis and (c) propeller
turbines
efficiently. And whereas the impulse turbine harnesses the kinetic con-
tained in a jet of high-pressure water, a reaction turbine responds to the
pressure (potential energy) from the weight of water acting on one side of
its blades.
There are several different types of reaction turbine. The most popular,
accounting for 80% of all hydraulic turbines in operation, is the Francis
turbine. This can be used in almost every situation but for very low heads,
propeller turbines and Kaplan turbines are frequently preferred.
Francis turbine
The Francis turbine was developed by James Bichens Francis around 1855.
Its key characteristic is the fact that water changes direction as it passes
through the turbine. The flow enters the turbine ina radial direction, flow-
ing towards its axis, but it exits along the direction of that axis. It is for this
reason that the Francis turbine is sometimes called a mtixed-flow turbine.The blades of a Francis turbine are carefully shaped to extract the max-
imum amount of energy from the water flowing through it. Water should
flow smoothly through the turbine for best efficiency. The force exerted by
the water on the blades causes the turbine to spin and the rotation is con-
verted into electricity by a generator. Blade shape is determined by the
height of the water head available and the flow volume. Each turbine is
designed for a specific set of conditions experienced at a particular site.
When well designed, a Francis turbine can capture 90-95% of the energy in
the water.
Francis turbines are the heavyweights of the turbine world. The largest,
at the Itaipu power plant on the Brazil-Paraguay border, generate 740 MW
each from a head of 120m.
The Francis design has been used with head heights of from 3 to 600m
but it delivers its best performance between 100 and 300m. Impulse tur-
bines are often preferred for higher heads while lower heads are exploited
using propeller and Kaplan turbines.
Propeller and Kaplan turbines
The propeller turbine looks like the screw of a ship, but its mode of oper-
ation is the reverse of the ship’s propulsion unit. Ina ship a motor turns the
propeller which pushes against the water, forcing the ship to move. In the
hydropower plant, by contrast, moving water drives the propeller turbine
to generate power.
Propeller turbines are most useful for low-head applications such as
slow running, lowland rivers. Their efficiency drops off rapidly when the
water flow drops below 75% of the design rating so plant designers often
use multiple propeller turbines in parallel, shutting down some when the
water flow drops in order to keep the remaining turbines operating at their
optimum efficiency.
In some cases multiple turbines will be inappropriate, even though
flows are not steady. Under these circumstances, a single turbine can pro-
vide better performance under variable flow conditions if the angle of
the blade on the turbine can be varied. This is the principle of the Kaplan
turbine.Another variant is the bulb turbine, used for extremely low-head condi-
tions. In this design the turbine and a watertight generator are enclosed
ina bulb-shaped container. The turbine rotor can have fixed or variable
blades. Water flows into one end of the bulb-shaped container and out the
other, with no change of direction. The bulb turbine has been used in tidal
power plants.
Generators
Most hydropower plants employ conventional generators with one gener-
ator for each turbine. Generally both the turbines and the generators are
designed for a specific site and the turbine and generator speeds are fixed
More recently variable-speed generators have also started to appear in
hydropower applications. These allow an additional degree of flexibility
by allowing the turbine speed to be varied in order to operate at the opti
mum efficiency under differing flow conditions. However variable-speed
generators are gencrally more expensive than their fixed-speed equivalents.
Financial risks
Hydropower relies on running water to generate electricity. This water is
provided by the rain cycle, a natural process outside the bounds of human
control. Consequently it is impossible to guarantee the output from a
hydropower plant at any given time in the future. Nevertheless the output
can be guaranteed with a fair degree of certainly over a long time scale; the
greater the period, the more certain the predictions will be.
This hydrological risk — the risk that there may be periods with no water
in the river where a plant is operating — can be quantified in the same way
as the risks involved in other types of power plant project. In fact one
could argue that it can be more precisely quantified than the risk associ-
ated with, for example a fossil fuel supply, where the supply chain depends
on human intervention.