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Hydropower Valuation Guidance and Research Program Review
Lead Companies
PNNL
Lead Researcher (s)
- Patrick Balducci
The objective of this project is to advance the state of the art in assessing the value of PSH plants and their contributions to the power system. The specific goal is to develop a detailed, step-by-step valuation guidebook that PSH developers, plant owners or operators, and other stakeholders can use to assess the value of existing or potential new PSH projects.
Technology Application
Pumped Storage
Research Category
Interconnect Integration and Markets
Research Sub-Category
Renewable Integration
Status
ongoing
Completion Date
TBD
- Conventional Hydro
Hydropower Value Study [HydroWIRES]
Lead Companies
PNNL
Lead Researcher (s)
- Abhishek Somani, abhishek.somani@pnnl.gov
This project's main objective was to perform foundational work to understand recent trends in hydropower operations, future expected changes, and technical abilities of hydropower resources to adapt their operations in the future. The work products included a landscape review of the recent trends in provision of various power grid services by hydropower resources. The project was also designed to identify high-impact research questions to lay the foundation for future research. Learn more. Technology Application
Conventional Hydro
Research Category
Interconnect Integration and Markets
Research Sub-Category
Future Grid
Status
ongoing
Completion Date
TBD
- Conventional Hydro
Hydropower Vision Roadmap Update
Lead Companies
PNNL
Lead Researcher (s)
- Alison Colotelo
Updating the Hydropower Vision Roadmap to help continue to make progress troward accomplishing the HydroPower Vision of to optimize hydropower's continuted contribution to a clean, reliable, low-carbon, domestic energy generation portfolio while ensuring that the nation's natural resources are adequately protected and conserved.
Technology Application
Conventional Hydro
Research Category
Research Sub-Category
Status
ongoing
Completion Date
TBD
- Conventional Hydro
Hydropower’s Contribution to Grid Resiliency and Reliability
Lead Companies
PNNL
Lead Researcher (s)
- Abhishek Somani
This project will develop frameworks, evaluation methodologies and tools to identify hydropower’s contribution to grid reliability and resilience, especially in the seconds to hours’ time frame. These methods will be demonstrated in this project through various use cases and will be provided to industry as guidance for understanding and evaluating hydropower’s role in reliability and resilience of the evolving electric grid. The outcomes of this work will shed light on the critical role that hydropower will play in the future grid and improve understanding of hydropower’s role in providing different services to support grid resiliency.
Technology Application
Conventional Hydro
Research Category
Interconnect Integration and Markets
Research Sub-Category
Future Grid
Status
ongoing
Completion Date
TBD
- Conventional Hydro
Hydropower’s Contributions to Grid Reliability and Resilience
Lead Companies
NREL, PNNL
Lead Researcher (s)
- Josh Novacheck
The U.S. electricity system is critical infrastructure that supports the economy, public safety, and national security. Although the U.S. power grid is very reliable according to standard metrics, there is an increased interest in resilience—the grid’s ability to respond to and recover from high-impact, low-probability events. These range from natural events, such as hurricanes, to human-related events, such as cyber and physical attacks. The impacts on system operations, and hence the responses needed by the system, can vary in magnitude, intensity, duration, and geography depending on characteristics of the extreme event. Hydropower facilities are often crucial in responding to these extreme grid events due to their agility and flexibility. They can quickly change both their real and reactive power outputs, and they are well-suited to provide voltage support, inertial response, primary frequency response, spinning, and operating reserves. Readily available conversion of stored energy—water stored behind dams—and low station power requirements make them ideal for black start restoration of the grid. Additionally, hydropower presently constitutes the power system’s largest portion of long-duration energy storage, which can act as a buffer during extended-duration system outages. However, no standard practices presently exist to quantify the contributions of hydropower resources and their attributes and response characteristics, especially for non-market and non-monetized grid services such as voltage support and inertial and frequency responses.
Technology Application
Conventional Hydro
Research Category
Research Sub-Category
Future Grid
Status
complete
Completion Date
2021
- Conventional Hydro
HydroSource
Lead Companies
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
Lead Researcher (s)
- Debjani Singh (debd@ornl.gov)
The HydroSource digital platform consists of hydropower related datasets, data model, visualizations and analytics tools that supports and enables hydropower research and development on topics of national interest such as U.S. hydropower market acceleration, deployment, resources assessment and characterization, environmental impact reduction, technology-to-market activities, and climate change impact assessment. It is used by hydropower operators and developers, government (federal agencies, resource agencies, and decision-makers at federal, state and local jurisdictions), nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), academia, policy leaders, and the public to inform policy decisions. The HydroSource project is an ongoing effort dedicated to improving the quality, functionality, dissemination and sharing of detailed and scientific hydropower data. It provides up-to-date information and reliable technical and analytical support for efficient, sustainable US hydropower generation and water management Technology Application
Conventional Hydro
Research Category
Research Sub-Category
Status
ongoing
Completion Date
TBD
- Conventional Hydro
HydroWIRES Collaborative
Lead Companies
PNNL
Lead Researcher (s)
- Alison Colotelo
The HydroWIRES (Water Innovation for a Resilient Electricity System) portfolio is organized into four interrelated research areas: 1) Value under Evolving System Conditions, 2) Capabilities and Constraints, 3) Operations and Planning, and 4) Technology Innovation. The mission of HydroWIRES (https://energy.gov/hydrowires) is to understand, enable, and improve hydropower’s contributions to reliability, resilience, and integration in a rapidly evolving electricity system. The initiative includes five national laboratories, PNNL brings expertise in valuation, market analysis, and grid integration and environmental performance of hydropower. Specifically, how hydropower capabilities contribute to the future grid and the capabilities and constraints of hydropower operations.
Technology Application
Conventional Hydro
Research Category
Interconnect Integration and Markets
Research Sub-Category
Renewable Integration
Status
ongoing
Completion Date
TBD
- Conventional Hydro
Ice Loads on Dams – Investigation of Available Updates
Lead Companies
CEATI International
Lead Researcher (s)
- #0247
To produce a set of three reports investigating extreme ice loads, ice loads on piers/spillways/gates/stoplogs, and ice impact loads.
Technology Application
Conventional Hydro
Research Category
Dam or Weir
Research Sub-Category
Dam Safety
Status
ongoing
Completion Date
Expected 2021
- Conventional Hydro
Identification of spatial and topographical metrics for micro hydropower applications in irrigation infrastructure
Lead Companies
Colorado State University
Lead Researcher (s)
- Brian Campbell
A recent agreement between the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the State of Colorado seeks to streamline regulatory review of small, low-head hydropower (micro hydropower) projects located in constrained waterways, (Governor’s Energy Office, 2010). This regulatory change will likely encourage the development of micro hydropower projects, primarily as upgrades to existing infrastructure. Previous studies of low-head hydropower projects have estimated the combined capacity of micro hydro projects in Colorado between 664 MW to 5,003 MW (Connor, A.M., et al. 1998; Hall, D.G., et al. 2004, 2006). However, these studies did not include existing hydraulic structures in irrigation canals as possible hydropower sites. A Colorado Department of Agriculture study (Applegate Group, 2011) identified existing infrastructure categories for low head hydropower development in irrigation systems, which included diversion structures, line chutes, vertical drops, pipelines, check structures and reservoir outlets. However, an accurate assessment of hydropower capacity from existing infrastructures could not be determined due to low survey responses from irrigation water districts. The current study represents the first step in a comprehensive field study to quantify the type and quantity of irrigation infrastructure for potential upgrade to support micro hydropower production. Field surveys were conducted at approximately 230 sites in 6 of Colorado’s 7 hydrographic divisions at existing hydraulic control structures. The United States Bureau of Reclamation contributed approximately 330 additional sample sites from the 17 western states. The work presented here describes a novel method of identifying geospatial metrics to support an estimation of total site count and resource availability of potential micro hydropower. The proposed technique is general in nature and could be utilized to assess micro hydropower resources in any region.
Technology Application
Conventional Hydro
Research Category
Interconnect Integration and Markets
Research Sub-Category
Hydraulic Forecasting
Status
complete
Completion Date
2012
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Have questions about WaRP?
Contact Marla Barnes at: marla@hydro.org