Welcome to WaRP, NHA’s new Waterpower Research Portal.

Emerging hybrid renewable energy systems offer 1) new opportunities for the global renewable energy industry with disruptive market potential, and 2) a scalable, economic, and reliable solution applicable to a power system of any size (e.g., large interconnected power systems, islands, microgrids). The project will result in development of a New National Asset – a grid-scale hybrid system test bed that can be used by the industry and research community for validation and demonstration of new control concepts, stakeholder engagement, workforce education, and as a validation platform for future standardization of hybrid technologies. It will lead to both technology and vendor neutral, “plug-and-play” hybridization guidelines and control architecture openly available at all segment of stakeholder community. This project proposes a pioneering approach to demonstrate how technology hybridization can fully leverage the value of variable utility-scale wind and solar PV generation in combination with hydro power generation to take them from a simple variable-energy resources to ones that provide dispatchability, flexibility and capacity services (similar to conventional power plants) and a full range of reliability and resiliency services (similar to or better than conventional plants) to the bulk power system. The project will demonstrate the ability of hybrid plants to operate in grid-forming mode and provide reliability and resilience services (black start, islanded operation) in a multi-MW scale system.

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.

Increasing penetration of intermittent renewable energy sources into the bulk electricity system has caused new operational challenges requiring large ramping rate and reserve capacity as well as increased transmission congestion due to unscheduled flow. Contemporary literature and recent renewable energy integration studies indicate that more realism needs to be incorporated into renewable energy studies. Many detailed water and power models have been developed in their respective fields, but no free-of-charge integrated water and power system model that considers constraints and objectives in both systems jointly has been constructed. Therefore, an integrated water and power model structure that addresses some contemporary challenges is formulated as a long-term goal, but only a small portion of the model structure is actually implemented as software. A water network model called MODSIM is adapted using a conditional gradient method to be able to connect to an overarching optimization routine that decomposes the water and power problems. The water network model is connected to a simple power dispatch model that uses a linear programming approach to dispatch hydropower resources to mitigate power flows across a transmission line. The power dispatch model first decides optimal power injections from each of the hydropower reservoirs, which are then used as hydropower targets for the water network model to achieve. Any unsatisfied power demand or congested transmission line is assumed to be met by imported power. A case study was performed on the Mid-Columbia River in the U.S. to test the capabilities of the integrated water and power model. Results indicate that hydropower resources can accommodate transmission congestion and energy capacity on wind production up until a particular threshold on the penetration level, after which hydropower resources provide no added benefit to the system. Effects of operational decisions to mitigate wind power penetration level and transmission capacity on simulated total dissolved gases were negligible. Finally, future work on the integrated water and power model is discussed along with expected results from the fully implemented model and its potential applications.