Rickly and FORT Capital Resources are in the midst of closing on their fifth hydropower plant together.

With more than 100 years of history in the hydro market, Rickly continues to evolve with the development of new technologies and site designs for the small hydro space.

“Making small hydropower growth a reality requires the right combination of technology, design and finance,” Ryan Cook, managing director of Rickly Hydro, said. “FORT has been a great partner and crucial in providing the finance ingredient to the equation. Through bringing a combination of discipline, creativity and execution while navigating the capital markets, they’ve consistently delivered the right structure for building these projects. It puts us in a great position to continue to scale our model and add to our portfolio of power producing assets.”

“It’s been a very rewarding experience for us,” Brian Fleming, managing member of FORT, said. “We set out from the beginning to build a strong foundation and model to scale. We’re aligned on a vision, have a very unique combination of expertise to achieve our goals, and share in a core set of values … great ingredients for building something significant together.”

Rickly has technology, manufacturing capability and design expertise to unlock the value of small hydro sites. Ultimately, the company is able to reduce both project costs and implementation timelines, making projects more economically feasible. With a combination of risk mitigation and financial product structuring, FORT is able to provide the capital required to make the projects go.

“Hydropower brings unique value to the rapidly growing renewable energy market, but not much hydro was getting built because it cost too much and took too long,” Cook said. “Our combination of equipment, design process and modular systems lower the cost, time and risk of deploying hydropower assets. This supports not only an initial focus on expanding capacity of existing assets but also powering non-powered dams of which there are nearly 77,000 in the U.S. We’re happy to have FORT as a partner in this effort.”