Hydropower is the one of the oldest renewable energy technologies and is wrongly thought of today as having little room to grow. The opportunity for new hydropower capacity is immense through both technology advancement and run-ofriver new stream reach projects. Despite the age of hydropower, a divide in opinion is forming regarding how we should proceed with generating power from smaller undisturbed rivers and canals. Hydropower generation techniques have been primarily fixed speed since its inception in the late 19th century, but it seems as though variable speed generation could hold the key to more efficiently utilizing new stream reach resources. This research aims to provide a cost benefit analysis of fixed speed vs. variable speed hydropower generation topologies, and distinguish the performance advantages that variable speed generation could hold in other aspects of hydropower. Simulation results are validated with hardware.
