Micro-hydro power for ecolodges and small hotels in Colombia

Why water, and not only sun

A turbine turns through the night, for as long as the stream carries its design flow. A solar array produces during useful sun hours only, and after dark it draws on batteries that have to be sized, replaced and paid for. For a lodge, that is the difference a guest notices at four in the morning, and the difference between a generator that runs at dinner and one that stays off.

The trade is real, though. Hydro needs civil works, a water concession and months rather than weeks. It depends on a stream that holds up in the dry season. And the two combine well: shared inverter and batteries, water carrying the base load, panels helping through the driest weeks.

Where it does not work, we say so on the visit. Plenty of water with very little fall calls for a different machine than a Pelton turbine, and a stream that nearly disappears in the dry months will not carry a lodge through the year, whatever it looks like in October.

What the work involves

Six stages, in this order. We do not sell the equipment on its own: an installation we cannot certify is one we do not build.

1. Site visit and aforo

   We measure the flow of your stream on site, in the dry season, and the head with a level. Nothing is estimated from a map or a satellite image: the dry-season flow sets the size of the machine, and getting it from the wet season is how installations end up idle in August.

2. Design

   Pipe route and inner diameter, number and size of the nozzles, regulation, and whether the property runs with a battery bank or feeds the grid. You receive the calculations together with the assumptions that produced them, so anyone you trust can check them.

3. Import

   European Pelton turbine and permanent-magnet generator, imported and nationalised, invoiced and under warranty. You are not left with an unsupported machine or a spare part nobody can source.

4. Civil works and installation

   Intake, desarenador (sand trap), penstock, powerhouse base, generating set and electrical panel. The civil works follow the ground you have, which is why two properties with the same head rarely cost the same.

5. Certification and permits

   RETIE certification of the electrical installation, water concession before the regional environmental authority with jurisdiction over the property, and the AGPE small-scale self-generation procedure before the grid operator when you want your surplus to count.

6. Commissioning and support

   Start-up, training for the mayordomo — the person who runs the property day to day — on filter washing, checking the sand trap after a spate and what to do if the machine stops, plus spare parts held in the country.

Permits are part of the job

Owning the land and holding the right to use the water are two different things. Abstracting water from a stream to generate electricity requires a water concession from the regional environmental authority with jurisdiction over the property — which authority that is depends on the municipality, and it is verified before anything is filed. If the property is connected to the grid and you want your surplus to be recognised, there is a second procedure, the AGPE small-scale self-generation filing, with your grid operator. Both are ours to handle, along with RETIE certification of the electrical installation.

Selling power to neighbours is a different regulated activity altogether, not an extension of self-generation. If that is what you have in mind, say so early: it changes the whole conversation.

Tax incentives

Colombian law — Ley 1715 de 2014, amended by Ley 2099 de 2021 — opens incentives for non-conventional energy sources, small hydro included: an income tax deduction, VAT exclusion, exemption from customs duty and accelerated depreciation. They are conditional, they require the project to be certified with the UPME, and the procedure itself changed in 2026 through resolución 563 de 2026. Older requirements and forms are still circulating online and may be void.

So no percentage, ceiling or deadline appears on this page, and you should be wary of anyone quoting one before seeing the project. Whether any of it reaches you depends on the project and on how the property is held — a company and an individual are not in the same position. We hand over the technical file and the installation documents; the assessment is your accountant's. Hidrofinca does not give tax advice.

The reference installation, in Alejandría

The plant we point people to is on the owner's own land in Alejandría, in eastern Antioquia: around three hectares on a slope near the cascada La Soledad, roughly two hundred metres of penstock, connected to the EPM rural line. It runs, and it can be visited — which is a slower argument than a brochure, and a harder one to fake.

Photographs and video of the site are not published here yet. Any illustration you see elsewhere on this site is illustrative and is labelled as such until the real images replace it.

Run the numbers — the simulator is in Spanish

The simulator on the home page takes the head, the dry-season flow, the length and diameter of the pipe and your current energy bill, and returns an estimate with every assumption visible next to the figure it produced. You can change the assumptions; the defaults are ours, and none of them is an official tariff. It exists to tell you whether a visit is worth arranging, not to size a machine.

Caída

Gross head: the vertical drop in metres between the intake and the turbine. Below about 15 m there is rarely a project; above 30 m the design gets comfortable.

Caudal

Flow, in litres per second. The one that counts is the flow left in época seca, the dry months — never the annual average and never the flow after a creciente, a spate.

Conducción

The penstock: its length and inner diameter. A long, narrow pipe loses head to friction before the water reaches the turbine, and on most sites it is the heaviest item in the budget.

Quebrada

The stream — the watercourse the plant draws from.

Predio

The property itself.

Finca

The farm.

Vereda

The hamlet, the smallest rural subdivision of a municipality.

Aforo

The on-site flow measurement. Everything serious starts here, and nothing we say before it is a commitment.

What we will not do is give you an output figure, a price or a payback period before the aforo. Anyone who does is guessing, and on a stream they have never seen, guessing is cheap.

Talk to us

WhatsApp is the fastest way, and it is how work gets done here. Tell us where the property is, what the stream looks like in the dry months, and how you power the place today — grid, diesel, solar, or a mix. If it is worth a visit, we will say so; if it is not, we will say that too.

Based in Medellín, Antioquia. Priority area: Antioquia, then the Eje Cafetero, Huila and Cauca. Further afield, ask — the answer depends on the road more than on the distance.