Emulating Hydropower in a Controlled Real-world Environment at ARIES for Rapid Prototyping of Next-generation Hydro-controls [HydroWIRES]

This project aims to solve the industry problem of risky, expensive, and time-consuming field validation of new hydropower governor controls by developing a controlled lab environment for evaluation. In this environment, researchers will be able to easily plug in real controller hardware to test under various grid conditions. This effort will utilize a variety of ARIES tools, including digital real-time simulation, actual hardware grid controllers, digital governors, variable speed hydro-generator, and more.