The Fortuna Hydroelectric Project is located in the Chiriqui Province of western Panama along the Chiriqui River and is a 300-MW, reservoir-based hydroelectric facility, which contains three 100-MW Pelton vertical turbines.

Scope of Services
Hatch provided technical and environmental due diligence services to support Globeleq’s bid to acquire a 25% interest in the 300-MW Fortuna Hydroelectric Project. Approximately six months later, similar due diligence services was repeated in the bidding for Hydro Quebec’s interest (about 25%) of the Project.

Specific work activities included:

• Review of the Project’s documentation, operating history and principal Project agreements
• Visited the Project sites to conduct a walkthrough to confirm and supplement the data reviewed
• Review of the Project’s designs with focus primarily on the overall designs, performance capabilities, major equipment and redundancies and life expectancies of the electric generating units, as well as interconnection with off-site facilities such as electric transmission. The review included dams (e.g. design and dam safety review) and hydraulic structures, the powerhouses, and hydroelectric generating equipment and operating constraints in order to evaluate their capability to perform in all anticipated modes
• Review the monthly and annual operating reports in order to assess Project net electrical production, performance indices, environmental compliance, regulatory compliance and outage histories
• Review of the key technical issues of all major Project agreements, including power purchase agreements, transmission interconnection, O&M agreements, and water rights agreements
• Review power generation studies performed by others, hydrologic records and historical generation records for the Project and provided forecast of future electricity production
• Review the status of permits and environmental compliance with the Project, including forecasts and estimates over a 20-year period for (a) major maintenance expenses and capital expenditure requirements; (b) O&M costs; (c) degradation of unit efficiency; and (d) availability and reliability of the Project and generating units
• Review of new construction of water diversion project comprised of several diversion dams, tunnels and pipelines for conveying diverted water to the Fortuna Reservoir. This capital improvement project was built for the purpose of providing additional water for increased generation
• Prepare a technical due diligence report, including a section on risk and mitigating matters analysis.

Project Highlights
The project review was performed under a fast-track, team approach that was completed on time and on budget. Globeleq Limited was successful in acquiring El Paso’s 25% interest in the Project.