C4: Water Management

Presentations are: Will Climate Change Affect How We Operate Water Resources Infrastructure? Presented by Mark Kessinger, DLZ National, Inc. Value of flow forecast and hydropower storage management to Mitigate energy droughts in the Western US, presented by Nathalie Voisin, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Assessing the Value of New Inflow Forecasts for Hydropower Producers, presented by Daniel Broman, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Details about each presentation and the speakers are below: Will Climate Change Affect How We Operate Water Resources Infrastructure? Presented by Mark Kessinger, DLZ National, Inc. The Ohio River Basin is a vast land area of 204,000 square miles covering 14 states and spanning three major climatic zones. Recent meteorological records show both significant drought conditions resulting in water supply emergencies, and extreme precipitation events resulting in major flood events throughout the basin. Further information supplied by the National Weather Service indicates that there has been a gradual warming trend throughout the basin since the late 1970s and precipitation has increased during the latter summer and early fall months during that time period as well. In 2017, the US Army Corps of Engineers, along with other federal and state agencies, completed the first study on how climate change is impacting the states that lie within the Ohio River Basin with Ohio being one of those. The study investigated potential climate change impacts to basin infrastructure, including hydropower plant operations, as well as the potential impacts on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. The primary purpose of the study was to investigate climate change effects that could adversely impact the infrastructure in the Ohio River Basin, and a secondary purpose of the pilot study was to investigate the potential effects of climate change on basin ecosystems. While with the Corps of Engineers, I led team of 20 professionals from the Corps, the USEPA, the USGS, the National Weather Service, the Nature Conservatory, and several universities collaborated in compiling data, conducting modeling, and predicting climate changes for the basin. The study included the research of numerous professionals in climatology, meteorology, biology, ecology, geology, hydrology, geographic information technology, engineering, water resources planning, and economics. It provided climate modeling information for the entire basin with forecasts of future precipitation and temperature changes throughout the basin. These forecasts are presented at the Hydrologic Unit Code-4 sub-basin level through three 30-year time periods between 2011 and 2099. In general, the modeling results indicated a gradual increase in annual mean temperatures between 2011 and 2040 amounting to one-half degree per decade, with greater increases between 2041 and 2099 of one full degree per decade. Hydrologic flow changes show substantial variability across the basin through the three time periods, with sub-basins located northeast, east, and south of the Ohio River expected to experience greater precipitation and thus higher stream flows—up to 50% greater—during most of the three 30-year periods. Conversely, those sub-basins located north and west of the Ohio River are expected to experience ever-decreasing precipitation (especially during the autumn season) resulting in decreased in-stream flows—up to 50% less—during the same periods. The potential impacts to infrastructure, energy production, and both aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems over the three 30-year time periods range from minimal in some sub-basins to dramatic and potentially devastating in others. The study addressed the formulation of potential adaptation strategies that could decrease the impacts associated with changes in precipitation, streamflow discharge, and temperatures across the basin. Although not prescriptive in nature, these strategies suggest potential paths forward that can be integrated into near-term and long-term infrastructure planning, structure rehabilitation, water policy analysis, and operational changes. The study presents potential mitigation and adaptation strategies that could be instituted by federal, state, municipal, and county jurisdictions, as well as individual and corporate landowners, to minimize the anticipated impacts of a changing climate in the Ohio River Basin. And many of these strategies can be instituted nationwide. Value of flow forecast and hydropower storage management to Mitigate energy droughts in the Western US, presented by Nathalie Voisin, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory The integration of wind and solar in the electric grid comes at a cost in terms of increased needs in reserve and ramping needs because those intermittent resources are considered as “must-take” resources by the bulk power system operators. Accordingly, the hydropower fleet has seen its operations change over the last decade with the rapid integration of wind and solar. These changes have sought to maximize the services hydropower offers to an evolving bulk power grid. There is a need by the hydropower and transmission operators to understand how hydropower multi-day and intra-day scheduling flexibility – under flow forecast uncertainties and over the entire hydropower fleet -can support grid operations under wind-solar-load forecast uncertainties. We developed a toolchain that includes a long term reservoir operations model and a dynamic programming short term reservoir optimization model applied at ~250 hydropower facilities over the US Western Interconnection, and a production cost model, that we exercise under bounding and synthetic flow, wind, solar and load forecast conditions. We quantify the value of weekly hydropower storage management – i.e., flexibility to schedule hydropower within a week and a day – under inflow forecast uncertainties, specifically in its role to support bulk power grid operations under forecast uncertainties in wind, solar and load. This study highlights how hydropower contributes to existing integration of wind and solar resources in general and specifically during energy drought events. We provide a benchmark to evaluate market incentives to compensate changing operational needs from the evolving bulk power grid. Assessing the Value of New Inflow Forecasts for Hydropower Producers, presented by Daniel Broman, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory There have been increases in the skill and availability of inflow forecasts, and hydropower producers need to understand how to evaluate the value these new forecasts provide to generation and operational flexibility. Upstream Tech and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are working under a DOE Small Business Innovative Research grant to develop approaches to answer this question and evaluate forecast value under real-world operational objectives and constraints for a number of hydropower plants across the United States (US). The approaches developed are used to examine forecast value while accounting for regulatory requirements, non-powered objectives, and other operational considerations. A number of sites across the US are used to apply these approaches that include diversity in operational conditions, hydrological regime, management considerations, and types of electricity markets (traditional with bilateral agreements, organized with day-ahead and real time markets). Several sets of inflow forecasts including Upstream Tech’s HydroForecast, existing operational forecasts where available, persistence forecasts as a lower benchmark, and perfect forecasts as an upper benchmark are used in hydropower schedulers that optimize hydropower generation and revenue while preserving other operational constraints. Results allow us to examine under which conditions and to what extent different forecast products add value and to quantify that value in terms of hydropower revenue and flexibility. These results provide an assessment of the value of forecast to hydropower producers across a diverse range of sites in the US, and present approaches for expanding forecast valuation studies for hydropower producers.