• Turbine Selection Chart — Head vs Flow Calculator | Hydel Energy

    ByHydel Engineer

    Every hydropower scheme reaches the same question once the survey work is done: the site gives you a head and a flow, so which turbine actually suits it?The answer has been drawn as a turbine selection chart for decades.

    Head on one axis, flow on the other, both logarithmic, with an envelope marking the working range of each runner type. Every manufacturer publishes a version. Most of them are static PDFs that you squint at, trying to locate your site somewhere between the gridlines.

    This is that chart, made interactive. Enter your net head and design flow, or drag the point, and every envelope covering that duty lights up — along with the electrical output, the estimated annual energy, and a note on what each runner type would mean in practice.

  • Hydroelectric in Canada — Inside the World’s Second-Largest Producer

    ByHydel Engineer

    Canada is one of the great hydroelectric nations of the world — the second-largest producer of hydel (hydroelectric) electricity on earth, behind only China. Around 60% of all electricity generated in Canada comes from hydropower, a proportion few large industrialised nations come close to matching. Yet Canada’s hydel story is fundamentally different from that of the emerging hydropower nations of South Asia or Africa. Where those countries are racing to develop untapped potential, Canada has already built an enormous, mature hydropower system over more than a century — and now faces a different set of questions:

    how to modernise ageing assets, how to manage the commercial legacies of decades-old contracts, and how to keep expanding in an era where the age of the mega-dam may be drawing to a close. This guide looks inside the engineering, the scale and the evolving future of hydropower in Canada.