Hydropower Modeling Challenges

Technical Report · Wed Apr 19 04:00:00 EDT 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1353003· OSTI ID:1353003

Stoll, Brady ^[1]; Andrade, Juan ^[1]; Cohen, Stuart ^[1]; Brinkman, Greg ^[1]; Brancucci Martinez-Anido, Carlo ^[1]

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1. National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)

Hydropower facilities are important assets for the electric power sector and represent a key source of flexibility for electric grids with large amounts of variable generation. As variable renewable generation sources expand, understanding the capabilities and limitations of the flexibility from hydropower resources is important for grid planning. Appropriately modeling these resources, however, is difficult because of the wide variety of constraints these plants face that other generators do not. These constraints can be broadly categorized as environmental, operational, and regulatory. This report highlights several key issues involving incorporating these constraints when modeling hydropower operations in terms of production cost and capacity expansion. Many of these challenges involve a lack of data to adequately represent the constraints or issues of model complexity and run time. We present several potential methods for improving the accuracy of hydropower representation in these models to allow for a better understanding of hydropower's capabilities.

• Research Organization: National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Wind and Water Technologies Office (EE-4W)
• DOE Contract Number: AC36-08GO28308
• OSTI ID: 1353003
• Report Number(s): NREL/TP--5D00-68231
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

13 HYDRO ENERGY
NREL
National Renewable Energy Laboratory
flexibility
generation
grid
hydropower
model
renewable
variable