Incorporating Hydrologic Routing into Reservoir Operation Models: Implications for Hydropower Production Planning

Increased reliance on variable and intermittent energy sources is likely to lead to a change in the production strategies of hydropower, thereby increasing the importance of accurate forecasting of production. For optimization models applied to water reservoirs, the computational cost increases with the number of reservoirs and future time-steps considered, often requiring simplification of the physical description of the flow dynamics. Here it is demonstrated that deficiency of the model of the flow dynamics on stream-reaches gives rise to errors in short-term planning, which leads to sub-optimal production. Here a simplified hydraulic model based on the kinematic-diffusion wave model was incorporated in the optimization of reservoir production planning. The time-lag distributions of the streams were evaluated for River Dalälven and implemented in a computationally efficient form of the kinematic-diffusion wave equation incorporated in a production optimization algorithm for a series of reservoirs. Compared to using a single time-lag for the water transfer on flow reaches between hydropower stations, the wave diffusion was found to affect the management as a deviation between the actual production and the planned production. The deviation was found to increase with increasing short-term regulation and decreasing Peclet number below about 10. For a sufficiently high Peclet number and long wavelength characterizing individual stream reaches, the distribution of time-lags become sufficiently narrow to motivate being replaced by a simpler description such as the constant time-lag.