Cascade Hydro becomes auditable

The challenge

Cascade’s plant had run since 1931 on a water licence that required annual reporting of flows and generation. The reports were assembled from gate logbooks, a 1980s flow meter and a good deal of institutional memory — and the regulator had begun asking for evidence that none of those sources could provide.

A planned refurbishment needed financing, and lenders were unwilling to lend against a production history nobody could verify.

What we did

Zephyra fitted each spillway and intake gate with calibrated flow instrumentation and read each turbine at the generator terminals, with hardware sized to a 38 MW plant rather than a utility fleet. Every release and every megawatt-hour was signed at source and committed to the ledger, and the plant’s licence conditions were mapped onto it so compliance could be read directly.

The regulator and the lending syndicate were given the same read-only access.

The outcome

The water-licence renewal, which had been expected to take two years, was settled fourteen months early on the ledger record. The refurbishment financed against a production history that, for the first time in ninety years, could be checked by anyone with the link.