Dear reader,

we hope that you, your families and friends are all safe and in good health, and had a good start into 2022. The Covid-19 pandemic still affects our daily lives, however, we hope and wish that soon we all will be able to get our (new) normal life back.

I’m glad to share the second HYPOSO newsletter with you, that contains, like the first newsletter, updates about the project, an outlook on future project activities, an interview, and results coming from a European partner project.

Within HYPOSO, we work on two major objectives, to stimulate the energy transition in developing and emerging countries (together with our partners in Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador in Latin America, and in Cameroon and Uganda in Africa), and to support of the European hydropower industry. Therefore, different tools were and will be developed.

In this newsletter, besides an update on project activities, we like to draw the attention to two outcomes of HYPOSO, the first expert site visits in one of the HYPOSO target countries, as well as updates about the HYPOSO Platform, a password secured online forum, set up for stakeholders from the HYPOSO target countries and from Europe and meant to facilitate making business together. Janusz Steller (Prof. at IMP PAN in Gdansk, Poland, and HYPOSO expert), will share his point of view on the hydro business and inform about the HYDROFORUM conference. Finally, results from the FIThydro project are presented.

For more information about HYPOSO, please refer to our website, follow our twitter account (@HyposoEU), join the HYPOSO LinkedIn group for discussions, and subscribe to HYPOSO's newsletter. We would appreciate it, if you forward our newsletter to colleagues and other interested persons.

On behalf of the HYPOSO team

Ingo Ball
HYPOSO Coordinator

While you are reading this newsletter, the second week of the Capacity Building Courses in Africa has just taken  place. During two separated weeks, selected participants from Cameroon and Uganda could participate to lectures that were given by HYPOSO project partners, who are experienced experts in the field.

The first week was carried out from 10 to 14 January 2022. The lectures were organised as online lectures (see photo below) and coordinated by IHE Delft (Netherlands), supported in week 1 by project partner VDU (Lithuania).
 

The lectures included the topics Basics of hydropower exploitation, Hydropower systems, Dams and storage basin, Power waterways, Hydrology, Hydraulic design, GIS & HP potential, and Computer based tools for HPP resources. A positive side effect of the organisation as online lectures was, that more participants could benefit from them. The photo below shows the participants that gathered in a central venue in Uganda to follow the lectures. It was organised in the same way in Cameroon.
 

The second week was carried out as live event in Ebolowa in Cameroon. The project partner from Cameroon, SHW (SOLARHYDROWATT) organised the venue and accommodation for the participants from Cameroon and Uganda. HYPOSO project partner HPAU (Hydro Power Association of Uganda) organised the travel for the participants from Uganda and was in charge to support them. The lectures covered the topics Hydraulic Units, Weirs and water intakes, Electrical equipment & lines, Operation and maintenance, and Hydropower systems. The event ended with a visit of the HPP Memve’ele which is located not too far away from Ebolowa.

The first (of five) HYPOSO Workshop on Framework Conditions was held on 28 January 2022 in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon. It was organised by the project partners TRMEW (Poland) and SHW (Cameroon). Ewa Malicka, President of the Polish Small Hydro Association, welcomed guests and presented the information on the HYPOSO project as well as the objectives of the workshop. She was supported by Joseph Kenfack (SHW), our project partner from Cameroon who managed to achieve the support of the Minister of Water Resources and Energy of Cameroon, who signed and stamped invitations to important stakeholders to support the HYPOSO project. After the introduction, Joseph Kenfack presented the outcomes of the analysis of the framework conditions for hydropower in Cameroon made within the project by our Lithuanian partner - VDU. Subsequently, Nino Frosio (Frosio Next) presented the three selected pilot sites, visited by the project experts in recent days. He pointed out the potential barriers these projects can encounter while being developed. After this, the most important part of the workshop came, i.e. the discussion, moderated by Prof. Bernhard Pelikan (Frosio Next) together with Joseph Kenfack, on the actual situation and needs for hydropower in Cameroon as well as on the ideas how these needs can be met and how the development of small hydro projects can be facilitated.
 

In the second half of August 2021, the HYPOSO project could finally take one big step towards a milestone. The experts from HYPOSO project partners Frosio Next (Italy), IMP PAN (Poland), and local partner HPAU gathered in Uganda to visit the selected sites for SHP development. The sites are located in the south, west, and east of Uganda.
 

At their arrival in the capital Kampala, the HYPOSO experts were welcomed by a local committee that was honoured by the presence of MoP and HYPOSO Advisory Board Member Dr Eng. Irene Muloni, who is also a Presidential Advisory on Energy. Further members of the welcome committee were the local stakeholders who like to develop the SHP sites together with the experts from the HYPOSO project.

The site visits after the welcome meeting took place for two weeks. At each site, the local site owners discussed details of a potential implementation of a SHP that would benefit in all cases the local population and shall lead to better development possibilities in the rural regions.
 

The HYPOSO experts use the insights they made to develop for each site a pre-feasibility study, which will be presented to the European industry at a later stage. As European funded project, HYPOSO invites the EU hydro industry first to deploy the sites together with the local owners.

Following requests from the EU hydro industry, we’ve asked our Project Officer at the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA) whether we could extend the countries that are eligible to use the HYPOSO Platform. CINEA gave us green lights that not only stakeholders from the HYPOSO partner countries Bolivia, Cameroon, Colombia, Ecuador and Uganda can register themselves on it, but also stakeholders from other African and Latin American countries.

The HYPOSO Platform is an exclusive, password-secured online forum for hydropower stakeholders and was developed to enable also smaller companies and organisations to make direct contacts and facilitate business relations with each other. It is necessary to register for the HYPOSO Platform to use its full functionality. HYPOSO Platform members are classified in accordance to their business focus along the small hydropower (SHP) value chain. The image below shows the starting screen of the HYPOSO Platform.
 

You can register for the HYPOSO Platform for free following this link: https://www.hyposo.eu/en/hyposo-platform/ .

One remark, when you’re thinking about WHY you should register to the HYPOSO Platform, the question is not WHY… the question is WHY NOT?

Exclusively on the HYPOSO Platform, pre-information about the business case sites will be published, and also the HYPOSO Map (a gis tool, helping to find promising sites suited for SHP, that will be published soon) will be accessible first only via the HYPOSO Platform, one more reason to register.

Janusz Steller, Professor at IMP PAN in Gdansk, Poland, and HYPOSO expert, will share his point of view on the hydro business and inform about the HYDROFORUM conference.

HYPOSO:
Please tell us about the background of your organisation and your role in the HYPOSO project.

J. Steller:
The Szewalski Institute of Fluid-Flow Machinery (IMP PAN) is a research institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences, located in Gdansk, in direct neighbourhood of Gdansk University of Technology (GUT), a Polish technical university which in 1945 overtook the premises and a part of tradition of the famous TH Danzig. The Institute evolved in 1956 from the Self-dependent Turbomachinery Establishment of the Polish Academy of Sciences….

FIThydro, Fishfriendly Innovative Technologies for Hydropower, was a European Commission-funded Horizon 2020 project with 26 partners from 10 European countries and a total budget of 7.2 million Euros. The project, led by the Chair of Hydraulic Engineering at the Technical University of Munich, highlighted the important role of hydropower as a renewable, CO2 free energy in Europe. FIThydro addressed the decision support in commissioning and operating hydropower plants (HPP) by use of existing and innovative technologies. It concentrated on mitigation measures and strategies to develop cost-efficient environmental solutions and on strategies to avoid individual fish damage while enhancing population developments. Therefore, HPPs all over Europe were involved as test sites.

Find the most important outcomes of the project briefly explained here.