Micro hydro 10 kW Europe

Hello everybody.
I live in Norway (north western Europe). On my property is a small creek that has maybe somewhere around 5-10 liters/second of water, an a head of about 160 - 180 meters, depending. I wish to find out how to harness this water for electric power. The output may be somewhere in the range of 5 - 10 kW. I found a price for a 10 kW turbine generator here that would be about 20 000 USD. I order to save money (and to learn more) I want to find out how much of the work it is possible to do myself.
We have a small organic ice cream factory on the farm, so we could use a lot of the electricity ourselves. The walk in freezer for example runs continuously all year round. So the electricity delivered should be 230 volts 50 Hz. The system should be grid connected so we could sell occasional surplus to the local energy company.
I appreciate any help and advice.

How much you can do yourself is going to depend nearly entirely on the law. So maybe some Norwegian self sufficiency sites could help more. Here the answer would be nearly nothing, putting in the supports would be about it.

That is an impressive hydro resource you have! If you are going to be tying to the grid, I cant imagine you will be permitted to do much of the work yourself - but things are no doubt very different here in the US.

Bear in mind that on top of the cost of the turbine will be the expense of the penstock. 180 meters of head would generate something like 250 psi (17 atmospheres - whatever that converts to in your preferred unit :) That much pressure is going to require steel pipe, and some pretty serious thrust blocking anywhere that the pipe changes direction. Depending on the overall distance from the intake to the turbine, the pipe will need to be sized to reduce friction loss. Also, intake design is important - you probably will not want to be hiking to the intake after ever rain storm like I do to clean leaves out of the screen.

Anyway, with as much as this system is going to cost, I think it would be a good call to enlist some professional help. I would suggest you start with the utility company, as they should know what is or is not possible. I am not sure what you pay for electricity, but 10kw output is 86,400kwh per year - which is about 13,000 dollars worth of electricity at .15usd/kwh.

Anyway, If you wanted to dip your toes, you could put together a smaller system with less pressure just to play around with it. I made a small system for under 2000usd, but I only have about 7 meters of drop - so it only produces a couple of kwh per day. It is also poorly engineered in essentially every way, but it keeps the lights on :) The regulations around surface water is very strict here, so getting permission would be essentially impossible as I understand it. I run DC from my turbine to a battery, then have an inverter to run my loads.

How much power does your farm use daily?

I think our Pelton turbine is mostly suitable for you, for more details please visit our website: microhydrosystem.com