How to Read a Hydropower Company

PPAs, rivers and debt - the ten numbers that matter, every listed hydro company compared, and prospectus forecasts checked against what happened.

Hydropower is NEPSE's biggest group of companies and many investors' first IPO - and most of them are small run-of-river plants with borrowed money, one river, one buyer and one price. This book explains how a hydro company really earns (units x the PPA rate, minus interest, depreciation and royalty), the ten numbers in its quarterly report that matter, and what the market rewarded over the past year. We checked the EPS forecasts in hydro prospectuses against what the companies later reported, valued a plant by the years left on its licence, and walk through Nepal's power sector - NEA, transmission, the monsoon surplus and exports. With Upper Tamakoshi, the 2021 hydro mania and the floods as Nepali case studies, and Brazil's drought, Kariba, Laos and Norway as global ones.