Short-Term Hydropower Optimization under Unsteady Hydraulic Flow Routing

Abstract:

This paper presents a hydraulic flow routing based strategy for optimizing hydro-power production. Hydraulic routing provides more realistic flow routing and has not been yet efficiently employed for optimizing hydro-power production. The present model integrates the Pre-Computed Hydraulic Ensembles (PC-HE) technique with an optimization model. PC-HE is basically a methodology that utilizes precomputed solutions along reaches on a river system. These solutions are stored in a database. The use of PC-HE provides efficiency and robustness for performing hydraulic simulations. This study takes advantage the PC-HE features for applying the methodology to reservoir routing. Further, an optimization method is used to optimize the reservoir outflows. These outflows, as a parameter for calculating hydro-power production, are used as decision variables for a multi objective constrained optimization. The combined strategy is expected to reduce the overall computational time for large-scale hydro-power production problems. This paper discusses the results of the application to a part of the hydropower system of the Columbia River (Northwest USA).