Pico Hydropower

Pico hydropower harvests energy from the water already flowing past your site. Using a low-head gravitational vortex turbine, it needs only a small height difference — roughly 1.5 to 5 metres — across a river, stream or irrigation canal to generate firm, round-the-clock electricity. No dam, no reservoir, and a design that lets fish and sediment pass safely through.

The defining advantage of pico hydropower is firmness: unlike solar and wind, a vortex turbine produces power continuously, day and night, through every season the water flows — the closest thing renewable energy offers to conventional baseload, at a scale that suits a single farm, factory, estate or trading centre. What makes the modern approach different from traditional hydro is how little it demands of the site and the environment. It runs on a low head — a drop of just one and a half to five metres across a river, stream or irrigation canal — so there is no need for a dam, a reservoir or a long penstock, which keeps civil cost, permitting and ecological impact all modest. The gravitational vortex is deliberately fish-friendly: the slow-turning rotor and open passage let fish and sediment travel through unharmed, so the scheme works with the watercourse rather than blocking it. With effectively one moving part, maintenance is light and can be handled locally, and the civil works last for decades, so once built the electricity is close to free. For a site currently leaning on expensive, dirty diesel, a vortex scheme can turn a modest drop in the water into a quiet, constant, decades-long supply — and it pairs cleanly with solar and storage where seasonal flow needs topping up. The one honest constraint is that the water resource must genuinely exist, which is why every project starts with a real head-and-flow measurement, never an assumption.