Management and operation of small hydropower plants through a climate service targeted at end-users

Abstract

The challenge to guarantee energy supply short and medium-term is essential for today’s energy sector in Europe. The high dependence on the weather of the renewable resources is currently moving the facilities management forward to the assessment and planning of the energy production. In this context, this work is focused on the use of forecasting climate data to foresee operation feasibility in small hydropower plants. With this aim, a technological climate service, SHYMAT (Small Hydropower Management Assessment Tool), is conceived as an on-line application targeted at end-users which brings automatically updated information of historical, real time and forecast data as well as local data of the specific hydropower plants. SHYMAT provides forecast of river streamflow and displays it in a user friendly web interface. Moreover this climate service shows information about the water volume available to be turbined (taking into account the minimum environmental flow), the energy production and the number of days of operability of the facility expected according to the forecast provided. This new climate service has been co-designed in tied connection with end users, perfectly suiting their needs and has been developed to be easily applied in other systems in order to satisfy local energy demands.