VULNERABILITY OF HIDROPOWER GENERATION IN AMAZON’S TRIBUTARIES UNDER GLOBAL CHANGE SCENARIOS

Abstract:

The Brazilian energy sector is under continued expansion. The majority of energy power generation in the country is done through hydropower, which represents around 88% of the energy originated from renewable sources in the country. Still, only 10% of the high potential for production of the Amazon basin is currently availed, and this raises attention for the implantation of new hydropower plants in the region.

When a hydropower plant is considered to be built, the natural characteristics of the region are taken into account, considering that the rainfall regime follows certain stationarity. However, under the possibility of global change, the expected capacity of the plants may be compromised.

The objective of this study is to evaluate if the current hydropower plants of some Amazon River tributaries can maintain their functionality under global environmental change conditions. For that, based on the discharge data and hydropower information available by Brazilian National Agency of Water and Energy we will infer the energy potential of these hydropower dams for the historic period that will be compared with the energy potential for future discharge under global environmental change conditions. The future discharge will be generated by the Distributed Hydrological Model developed at the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (MHD-INPE), driven by different climate change scenarios projected by regional and global atmospheric models, associated with land use scenarios projected by a dynamic land use model (LUCC-ME/INPE). MHD-INPE will be calibrated through observed discharges for 1970-1990 using current land use conditions, and will generate discharges for the period of 2000 to 2050. In addition, special attention will be given to the presence of secondary forest growth in the land use scenarios in order to identify the importance of considering this use in the modelling exercise, since that use is not usually considered in hydrological modelling studies.