Benefits of SHP technology

• According to the water potentials which can be geographically wide-spread, small power plants can be decentralised and assure the energy needs of isolated villages.
• Thanks to their small size, it permits local people's involvement from the implementation to operation, maintenance and management.
• Small hydropower plants do not generate atmospheric emissions, or solid wastes or liquid ones.
• SHP is especially suitable for rural areas by being economically feasible, since the resource is an indigenous one, it has low distribution and manpower costs and has a long life (> 25 years) The electrification can become possible, where a supply network would have required much more time and money. Further, SHP plants assure a high energy payback ratio. For each power generation system, the “energy payback” is the ratio of energy produced during its normal life span, divided by the energy required to build, maintain and feed the generation equipment. If a system has a low payback ratio, it means that much energy is required.

In the last 30 years China, Nepal, Vietnam and many South American countries have seen a large number of micro- and pico-hydro projects developed that are providing electrification to many thousands of households. Chinese villages have developed the most micro-hydro with 100,000 very small capacity units installed, amounting to 188.5MW (Chinese Rural Renewable Energy-CCRE, 2003) and rural families in Vietnam have installed 130,000 pico-hydro systems (usually 200 Watts) in the last 15 years on a purely commercial basis (Paish & Green, 2002).