This paper addresses the problem of designing an optimal micro-hydro power installation in rivers with generic profiles, when micro-hydro schemes are studied. This is geared towards the application of Micro Hydro Power Plants to supply marginal isolated areas using small Pelton wheels, where both technology and resources are limited. For this purpose, a model of a Pelton micro-hydro plant is first developed. Subsequently, a discretization of the river profile is made, on the basis of which a set of integer variables are proposed, being the model transformed then into an integer optimization problem. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is showed through a specific design problem. The application of the developed method is especially interesting when designing micro-hydro plants to provide electricity to isolated populations, where both technology and resources are limited. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.