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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

Probabilistic Hydropower Flexibility Valuation: Case Studies for Boating Flow Regime

The optimal scheduling of hydropower generation holds significant importance to power system operation. The unique requirements of environmental constraints and the power system, depending on their respective objectives, demand distinct flow patterns. While power system stakeholders strive to optimize revenue in electricity markets, stakeholders from boating recreation seeks to identify flow ranges that optimize the boating experience. In pursuit of a win-win solution, this study aims to reconcile the interests of various stakeholders in hydropower scheduling. The maximum revenue from day-ahead electricity market is explored through an optimization process considering both plant operation constraints, boating flow constraints, water availability, and market prices. Results of real world case studies at a river in California show that the proposed approach can achieve dual objectives: maximizing market revenue while addressing boating recreation necessities. In addition, as the accuracy of electricity price forecasting and flow forecasting increase, the optimal revenue becomes increasingly advantageous to hydropower plant operators.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2023

Hydropower Role in a Power Grid with a High Proportion of Variable Renewables

The importance of hydropower increases as the power grid evolves with the higher variable renewable contribution. As conventional thermal power plants are retired, the importance of hydropower contribution increases to balance the variability of solar and wind generation. However, reservoir water resources are constrained by multiple constraints, and variability of water inflow to the reservoirs creates limitations to dam water releases for power grid needs. Coordination of multiple tools, including water resources modeling, ecological modeling, and technical and economic power grid modeling, informs dam water releases. Better representation of ecological constraints and other water use details in the suit of power grid models are required to identify the hydropower flexibility to provide multiple power grid services. Impacts of water planning and hydropower operation changes to a power grid are better understood by production cost model simulations with technical and economic data, including unserved energy, reserve failures, transmission congestion to serve load, and local marginal price increases. Similarly, PCM simulation of current and future projected power grid information, including LMP, and carbon emission rates, informs short-term water release plans and long-term investments for power plant upgrades for technical and ecological needs. Hydropower operations of several case studies are simulated to understand operation patterns, revenue, water release decisions in multiple time scales (month, day, minutes), hydropower contracts scheduling, and water variability impacts.

environmental↗
DOE OSTI2025

GODEEEP-hydro: Historical and projected power system ready hydropower data for the United States

Hydropower is a critical electricity resource in the United States which, in addition to low-cost electricity generation, provides valuable ancillary grid services, and supports the integration of nondispatchable weather-dependent resources (e.g., wind and solar). Despite its value to the grid, there are very few comprehensive datasets available from which to study both historical and future impacts of climate, weather driven energy droughts, and integration of other weather driven generation. In this paper, we present a hydropower generation dataset covering 1,452 hydroelectric plants in the contiguous U.S. The dataset contains monthly and weekly hydropower generation estimates for both historical (1982–2019) and future (2020–2099) periods which includes 4 future climate scenarios. In addition, this dataset provides weekly and monthly constraints such as minimum and maximum power which are particularly useful in power system models which are used to study grid reliability, transmission planning and capacity expansion.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2024

Hydropower Flexibility and Environmental Tradeoffs Analysis

The importance of hydropower increases as the power grid evolves with the higher variable renewable contribution. As conventional thermal power plants are retired, the importance of hydropower contribution increases to balance the variability of solar and wind generation. However, reservoir water resources are constrained by multiple constraints, and variability of water inflow to the reservoirs creates limitations to dam water releases for power grid needs. Coordinating multiple tools, including water resources, ecological, and technical and economic power grid modeling, informs dam water releases. The case study, the Columbia River Basin multipurpose reservoir project, is operated for hydropower production and many other purposes considering the aquatic habitat of the river basin. Specifically, the river basin fish population is a vital element for the tribal community of the river basin. We integrated a production cost model, a water resource model, and decades of tribal knowledge to analyze the fish-friendly way of operating Columbia hydropower scheduling and grid impacts. We measure power grid impacts for various water resources planning scenarios in terms of total system operating cost, system reliability indicators, changes in wind and solar generation and curtailments, local marginal prices, and revenue for hydropower producers. The study results inform reservoir operating rules decisions from hydropower power producers, system operators, other water users, tribes, environmentalists, and other stakeholders.

Columbia River↗
DOE OSTI2025

RectifHydPlus: Forty Year Hydropower Generation Reanalysis for Conterminous United States, Version 1.1.

This dataset contains monthly hydropower net-generation totals for 590 plants (each >10 MW) across the conterminous United States (CONUS) from 1980 to 2019. RectifHydPlus v1.1 includes one harmonized table of historical monthly generation—backfilled with observed monthly values where available—and two companion tables: (i) an estimates-only version with no backfill and (ii) a hydrological-control version that removes the effects of capacity and operational change. Each table comprises 23,600 records (590 plants × 40 years). The dataset was developed to address temporal gaps and inconsistencies in publicly available hydropower generation data as available through EIA-923 survey reports. Each record includes a quality label denoting the underlying proxy—from best (direct reservoir releases) to weakest (pattern copied from similar years). By combining the agency-reported survey records with observed and simulated hydrologic releases, RectifHydPlus offers complete, quality-labeled monthly estimates suitable for trend analysis and generation of hydropower generation inputs for energy-water modeling.

Turner, Sean [Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)↗
DOE OSTI2024

EverGREEN 2045: An Energy Mix to Decarbonize Washington State

Washington State’s future resource mix is likely to be comprised of intermittent renewables and carbon-free generation including hydropower by 2045. Generation will likely be comprised of wind, solar photovoltaic (PV), batteries, pumped storage hydropower (PSH), existing nuclear power plants, and potentially enhanced geothermal systems and advanced nuclear reactor technologies. To assess the cost and stability of the future resource mix, we partner with X-energy (advanced reactor design) and AltaRock Energy (enhanced geothermal system) for proprietary cost data. After estimating the costs of these two new technologies, we design plausible future resource mix scenarios to meet Washington State’s Clean Energy Transformation Act which transitions the state to carbon-free generation by 2045. We assess the cost and stability of the future resource mix with power system analysis tools, finding revenues are sufficient to cover variable operating and maintenance costs for most technologies providing power in 2030 and 2045, but capacity payments or power purchase agreements will likely be necessary for flexible resources, including enhanced geothermal systems and advanced nuclear reactors, to participate in the future resource mix.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2025

The Interactive Hydropower Generation Map

This interactive map shows the spatial distribution and temporal trends of net generation for hydropower facilities in the U.S., as included in the Existing Hydropower Assets (EHA) Net Generation Plant Database.

Schmidt, Erik [Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL↗
DOE OSTI2024

South Asia Group for Energy - Bhutan

Bhutan's electricity system is already low-carbon through the use of hydropower. However, generation from hydroelectric plants is reduced during the dry winter months and will be impacted by climate change and other extreme weather events. Bhutan is mitigating these risks by diversifying their energy mix with clean energy resources. Bhutan is exploring photovoltaic (PV) solar energy development to enhance its energy system's overall resilience. To ensure efficient grid planning and solar integration, Bhutan's power generator, Druk Green Power Corporation, and the transmission and distribution utility, Bhutan Power Corporation, are partnering with the South Asia Group for Energy (SAGE) to develop their solar capabilities, integrate solar energy into the grid, and strengthen Bhutan's energy infrastructure and efficiency.

Bhutan↗
DOE OSTI2024

Methodology for Exploring Water and Hydropower Operating Criteria That Simultaneously Improve Economic and Environmental Considerations

Despite the reliability and flexibility of hydropower, the operation of hydroelectric power plants may have significant impacts on the downstream river system, including its water stage, sediment transport, and water temperature, ultimately affecting the ecology. To address these challenges, there is a need to identify water scheduling patterns that improve both hydropower economics and the environment relative to current operations. This paper presents a new methodology to explore promising operational criteria/rules that can achieve such improvements. Typical environmental impact statements and relicensing processes generally perform detailed site-specific analyses of a few alternatives that focus on reservoir water release operating rules and their associated environmental impacts. In contrast, the methodology presented in this article uses a widely applicable approach that explores a much larger solution space. This large set of potential alternatives can be represented in a multidimensional space for which one axis represents the economic value and the other axis quantify individual environmental impacts (e.g., sediment transport and fish growth), and they are explored via two approaches: a Monte Carlo simulation that identifies “win–win” alternatives and a multi-objective optimization problem that identifies Pareto-optimal alternatives.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2024

Identifying Robust Decarbonization Pathways for the Western U.S. Electric Power System Under Deep Climate Uncertainty

Climate change threatens the resource adequacy of future power systems. Existing research and practice lack frameworks for identifying decarbonization pathways that are robust to climate-related uncertainty. We create such an analytical framework, then use it to assess the robustness of alternative pathways to achieving 60% emissions reductions from 2022 levels by 2040 for the Western U.S. power system. Our framework integrates power system planning and resource adequacy models with 100 climate realizations from a large climate ensemble. Climate realizations drive electricity demand; thermal plant availability; and wind, solar, and hydropower generation. Among five initial decarbonization pathways, all exhibit modest to significant resource adequacy failures under climate realizations in 2040, but certain pathways experience significantly less resource adequacy failures at little additional cost relative to other pathways. By identifying and planning for an extreme climate realization that drives the largest resource adequacy failures across our pathways, we produce a new decarbonization pathway that has no resource adequacy failures under any climate realizations. This new pathway is roughly 5% more expensive than other pathways due to greater capacity investment, and shifts investment from wind to solar and natural gas generators. Our analysis suggests modest increases in investment costs can add significant robustness against climate change in decarbonizing power systems. Our framework can help power system planners adapt to climate change by stress testing future plans to potential climate realizations, and offers a unique bridge between energy system and climate modeling.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Drought Impacts on Hydroelectric Power Generation in the Western United States

The Western United States experiences large fluctuations in rain and snowfall from year to year, affecting river flows and reservoir levels throughout the region. This interannual variability in water resources leaves a strong signature on total annual energy generated by the region’s fleet of hydroelectric dams. In a wet year, like 2011, hydroelectric power can meet 30 percent of annual western electricity demand. That contribution can drop below 20 percent during severe drought years. Characterizing the contribution of hydroelectric power to the western generation portfolio during drought is crucial to understanding the resilience of the hydropower sector to climate-related risk, both now and in the future. This report analyzes the impacts of historical western droughts on hydroelectric power production by combining two decades’ worth of annual generation—recorded at more than 600 hydroelectric power plants—with historical climate data developed for distinct hydropower subregions of the West. The most extreme impacts of drought on hydroelectric power are found at individual dams where reservoir levels are so low that released water and thus generation becomes severely restricted. These isolated cases often receive widespread media attention, leading to a common misconception that hydroelectric power is an unreliable technology whose role will diminish over time as the western climate produces longer and more severe droughts. Yet, when aggregated to the scale of the West, the observational records of hydropower generation reveal a different story. Even during the most severe droughts experienced since the turn of the century, the western hydropower fleet sustained more than 80% of its typical annual generation. Observational data indicate that drought in 2021 led to the worst year for hydropower generation in the West since 2001, with total generation approximately 16 percent below the 21st century two-decade average. The year 2021 was particularly severe in California (second worst hydro year of last two decades, ~48 percent below average) and Oregon (worst hydro year of last two decades), while generation in Washington and Idaho was affected to a lesser degree (~12 percent below average for combined region). The year 2001 remains the year of lowest western hydropower generation of the twenty-first century so far, owing to extreme drought in the Pacific Northwest, where about two-thirds of western hydropower capacity is located. The primary reason for this relative stability is the diversity of weather across the West; drought rarely impairs hydroelectric power across all river basins at the same time.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2023

An Assessment of Deploying Advanced Pumped Storage Hydropower Technology in U.S. Electricity Markets

Pumped storage hydropower (PSH) is a type of hydropower technology where energy can be stored and generated by moving water between two reservoirs of differing elevations. In addition to providing 97% of the total utility-scale hydropower storage in the United States, PSH plants have operational characteristics - such as high ramp rates and the ability to provide reserves - that contribute to greater flexibility and reliability of the power grid. New PSH technologies can provide additional flexibility beyond existing, fixed-speed units. With the emergence of high levels of variable renewable energy resources (e.g., wind and solar), energy storage is expected to be crucial to the reliability and reliance of the power grid in a low-carbon future. At diurnal and longer durations, PSH plants have some of the lowest costs per unit of energy, have been proven to be reliable and efficient, are not cycle-limited, and typically have long lives, often exceeding 50 years. The work presented here focuses on a new generation of PSH: ternary PSH and quaternary PSH (together referred to as T/Q-PSH). Given recent experience in Europe, grid operators in the United States and elsewhere are increasingly focusing their attention on T/Q-PSH as a proven, financeable technology that can offer utility-scale, long-duration, fast-acting energy storage capabilities and grid services. T/Q-PSH differs from conventional PSH in that it can provide fast-response ancillary services during both generating and pumping operations. This capability together with fast mode switching times are key attributes that make T/Q-PSH technologies attractive for managing and stabilizing electricity systems with high amounts of variable renewable energy.

ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY,HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2023

New Tool Evaluates the Financial Viability of Pumped Storage Hydropower

The rapidly evolving electricity system with increasing variable renewable energy (VRE) resources provides both opportunities and challenges for the power sector. With the significant ramps and intermittency associated with VRE resources, the requirements and need for additional flexible resources increase. Pumped storage hydropower (PSH) provides flexibility to the electricity grid to replace fossil fuel plants, which are responsible for 25% of U.S. emissions. PSH projects support various aspects of power system operations, including flexibility, ramping capability, energy, ancillary service, black start, and others. The significant potential of hydropower requires understanding the different value drivers to the electricity system specific to the location of a project and then optimizing the plant for the different system values. Thus, determining the value of PSH projects and their many services and contributions to the electricity system can be a challenge for potential developers, system owners, regulators, policy makers, and consultants.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2023

Representing the Future Role of Hydropower and Pumped Storage Hydropower (PSH) in Electricity Planning Tools

Existing tools for long-term electric sector planning struggle to represent hydropower's nuanced site-specific technical and operating characteristics, which depend on technical specifications as well as water management practices and regulations. As a result, long-term planning models and tools insufficiently characterize hydropower value and incentives, and they cannot fully represent the role hydropower can play in a future electricity system that could include a high penetration of variable wind and solar generation, battery storage, and other low-carbon technologies. This presentation demonstrates the culmination of a multi-year effort to enhance hydropower representations in electricity planning models at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), as part of the U.S. Department of Energy (USDOE) HydroWIRES Initiative. New modeling techniques are demonstrated using the NREL Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS), an open-access electric sector capacity expansion model used extensively in a wide range of technology deployment and integration analysis, including the 2016 USDOE Hydropower Vision. ReEDS uses a least-cost optimization approach to understand investment and operation of electricity generation, storage, and transmission technologies under future scenarios of electricity technology innovation, demand, policy, and other sectoral drivers. ReEDS was modified to better represent value and opportunities for both pumped storage hydropower (PSH) and hydropower systems without pumping. We incorporated a new national closed-loop PSH resource and cost assessment to explore new PSH deployment opportunities and added plant-level data to better represent the existing PSH fleet. New upgrade pathways enable opportunities for enhanced hydropower flexibility by adding pumps, upgrading dispatchability, increasing capacity, or increasing energy availability. The model was also modified to better represent the value of long-duration energy storage beyond diurnal time scales, allowing both hydropower and PSH to better balance energy supply and demand variations in high-renewable systems. These new features are demonstrated under reference and high-renewable futures and a range of sensitivity scenarios to understand which hydropower and PSH deployment and upgrade opportunities are the most attractive. These scenarios indicate potential for new closed-loop PSH deployment and for hydropower flexibility improvements to have important impacts on long-term electricity system emissions and economic outcomes. Increasing flexibility of the existing hydropower fleet can reduce the need to invest in new flexible grid technologies and help achieve decarbonization goals. Systems with sufficient energy storage could also be valuable for balancing seasonal differences in renewable energy availability, particularly from solar energy. The methods developed for ReEDS and subsequent scenario results reveal important considerations for future hydropower and grid system planning, and all data and code is freely available in a public code repository for use throughout the hydropower industry.

capacity expansion↗
DOE OSTI2022

An Assessment of Hydropower Potential at National Conduits

In support of the mission of the US Department of Energy Water Power Technologies Office to promote domestic next-generation hydropower growth, this study provides a first-of-its-kind assessment of the hydropower development potential on existing water conduits nationwide. This study evaluates the potential for conduit hydropower development in the municipal, agricultural, and industrial sectors across the United States. The research team developed systematic methods to evaluate conduit hydropower capacity potential (MW) and energy generation potential (GWh/year) at four categories of conduits across the United States. They include the following: (1) Water supply pipelines for municipal and industrial uses, (2) Wastewater discharge conduits from municipal and industrial systems, (3) Agricultural water conduits including irrigation canals and ditches in the 17 western states that rely heavily on irrigation, and (4) Thermoelectric power plant cooling water discharge conduits. For each type of conduit, the team developed and implemented a method to estimate hydraulic head and annual water flows—and the hydropower potential—based on analyses of satellite imagery, topography, and existing data sets on water systems and power plants. These methods support a consistent, replicable estimate of conduit hydropower potential across 3 sectors and all 50 states, aggregated at the county and state levels. The assessment was conducted at the reconnaissance level, considering resources that could be available for development at the state and national levels using present-day assumptions about conduit hydropower technology.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2023

Data-Driven Scalable Emulation of Hydropower Using Real-Time Hardware-in-the-Loop

This presentation covers Motivation: (1) With the increased grid integration of inverter-based resources, hydropower plays a crucial role in maintaining the bulk power system reliability and resilience; and (2) A more dynamic response and new control designs are required to meet the grid requirements. To evaluate any modification, control-prototyping, performance validation and de-risking grid integration of hydropower, a high-fidelity environment is required. Also covers Objectives: (1) To develop data-driven emulation of hydropower using hardware-in-the-loop for different size, types of hydro plants; and (2) To characterize hardware and obtain accurate dynamic response for shaft speed, torque, and power. Provide a mechanical power interface with emulated dynamics of a hydro-turbine shaft that can be coupled to electrical generators for mechanical and electrical PHIL.

electrical↗
DOE OSTI2025

Dynamic Modeling of a Kaplan Hydroturbine Using Optimal Parametric Tuning and Real Plant Operational Data

To address grid variability caused by renewable energy integration and to maintain grid reliability and resilience, hydropower must quickly adjust its power generation over short time periods. This changing energy generation landscape requires advance technology integration and adaptive parameter optimization for hydropower systems via digital twin effort. However, this is difficult owing to the lack of characterization and modeling for the nonlinear nature of hydroturbines. To solve this issue, this paper first formulates a six-coefficient Kaplan hydroturbine model and then proposes a parametric optimization tuning framework based on the Nelder–Mead algorithm for adaptive dynamic learning of the six-coefficients so as to build models that describe the turbine. To assess the performance of the proposed optimal parametric tuning technique, operational data from a real-world Kaplan hydroturbine unit are collected and used to model the relationship between the gate opening and the generated power production. The findings show that the proposed technique can effectively and adaptively learn the unknown dynamics of the Kaplan hydroturbine while optimally tune the unknown coefficients to match the generated power output from the real hydroturbine unit with an inaccuracy of less than 5%. The method can be used to provides optimal tuning of parameters critical for controller design, operational optimization and daily maintenance for hydroturbines in general.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2021

Pumped-Storage Hydropower using Abandoned Underground Mines (PSH-AUM) as an Innovative Energy Storage Technology for Fossil-Integrated Systems

Pumped-storage hydropower (PSH) provides around 95% of all utility-scale energy storage in the U.S. and globally. Additional deployment of PSH is hampered by excessively long permitting and commissioning requirements and is constrained to locations for which natural topography provides suitable elevation relief between the upper and lower reservoirs (the ΔH challenge). The purpose of this research was to evaluate Pumped-Storage Hydropower using Abandoned Underground Mines (PSH-AUM) as a means to solve the ΔH challenge and initiate the commercialization pathway for a promising new energy storage technology. Four primary tasks were conducted: Screening and ranking of candidate sites for project development; multiphase reservoir modeling to evaluate mine performance; techno-economic analysis and preliminary designs for PSH-AUM systems integrated with fossil-fuel power units; and stakeholder engagement to identify pathways to commercialization of this new technology. Key results were achieved in each of the four primary tasks. Candidate site screening determined that nearly 10,000 underground mines were spatially locatable, of which more than 100 sites appear suitable for integration with existing fossil power plants that are expected to remain in longer-term operation. Mine reservoir models were developed using PNNL’s STOMP simulator and parameterized using candidate site data to evaluate interactions with the surrounding groundwater system and confirm the potential for some mines to accommodate inflows and outflows on the order of 100 m3/s over 8-hour durations (1.6 GWh system) without excessive aqueous pressures. Techno-economic analysis resulted in a project cost optimization scheme to identify key sensitivities and the development of preliminary designs that can minimize overall costs of deployment. Finally, stakeholder engagement with industry, state government, and local economic development leaders confirmed the viability of PSH-AUM as a promising new technology. Our Phase I project results suggest that PSH-AUM technology has a domestic market potential on the order of $100+ Billion with ample space for technology development to commercialization within the next decade.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗