IN11B-1778
Short-Term Hydropower Optimization under Unsteady Hydraulic Flow Routing

Monday, 14 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Luis Angel Gomez Cunya, Oregon State University, School of Civil and Construction Engineering, Corvallis, OR, United States
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).