| Abstract: | As a part of Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), Government of India programme for promoting small hydropower (shp) development, efficiency testing and performance evaluation of Small Hydro Power plants is mandatory for receiving financial incentives by plant developer. The task of efficiency testing and performance evaluation of shp plants was assigned by MNRE to Alternate hydro Energy Centre (AHEC) Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee in the year 2003 along with financial support to acquire the required instrumentation and develop expertise. Over 200 small hydro plants (SHPs) of different capacity (1–25 MW) as well as types viz dam toe based, run of river and canal fall based have been tested for efficiency and performance evaluation during the period 2005–2018 in different states of India as per IEC-60041, IEC-62006, ISO -1438-1 and ISO-748 to the extend feasible as per available resources and time. During efficiency testing of hydro plants, it has been found that discharge measurement is very challenging activity as the most of the plant owners did not provide the required space and provisions for mounting/fixing the instruments for discharge measurement. After commissioning of the plants it becomes extremely difficult to select the ideal/suitable locations and providing the provisions for mounting different measuring instruments. Various problems observed during discharge measurement are discussed in this paper and may be helpful for testing in future. |
