Sensitivity of Regional Hydropower Generation to the Projected Changes in Future Watershed Hydrology

Abstract:

Hydropower is a key contributor to the renewable energy portfolio due to its established development history and the diverse benefits it provides to the electric power systems. With the projected change in the future watershed hydrology, including shift of snowmelt timing, increasing occurrence of extreme precipitation, and change in drought frequencies, there is a need to investigate how the regional hydropower generation may change correspondingly. To evaluate the sensitivity of watershed storage and hydropower generation to future climate change, a lumped Watershed Runoff-Energy Storage (WRES) model is developed to simulate the annual and seasonal hydropower generation at various hydropower areas in the United States. For each hydropower study area, the WRES model use the monthly precipitation and naturalized (unregulated) runoff as inputs to perform a runoff mass balance calculation for the total monthly runoff storage in all reservoirs and retention facilities in the watershed, and simulate the monthly regulated runoff release and hydropower generation through the system. The WRES model is developed and calibrated using the historic (1980–2009) monthly precipitation, runoff, and generation data, and then driven by a large set of dynamically- and statistically-downscaled Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 climate projections to simulate the change of watershed storage and hydropower generation under different future climate scenarios. The results among different hydropower regions, storage capacities, emission scenarios, and timescales are compared and discussed in this study.