Developing countries around the world are expanding hydropower to meet growing energy demand. In the Brazilian Amazon, >200 dams are planned over the next 30 years, and questions about the impacts of current and future hydropower in this globally important watershed remain unanswered. In this context, we applied a hydrologic indicator method to quantify how existing Amazon dams have altered the...

Currently, hydropower accounts for close to 16% of the world’s total power supply and is the world’s most dominant (86%) source of renewable electrical energy. The key resource for hydropower generation is runoff, which is dependent on precipitation. The future global climate is uncertain and thus poses some risk for the hydropower generation sector. The crucial question and challenge then is w...

The construction of large hydropower plants involves potentially high risks for the health and lives of persons as well as for the environment. Therefore a particularly high level of safety is required for such plants. The implementation of such high safety standards in power plants begins with construction measures such as the selection of suitable material, dimensions and monitoring the quali...

The world’s tenth largest river in terms of annual flow volume, the Mekong is comparatively undeveloped in terms of its exploitable water resources, so that its hydrological regime remains largely natural and unregulated. However, this is about to change given the scale of water resources schemes proposed over the next two decades. These include over 23 cubic kilometres of reservoir storage beh...

Operational policy for hydropower dams must balance energy generation goals with environmental impacts under federal regulation, such as the Endangered Species and the Clean Water Acts. Multiple impoundments, reservoirs, outlet structures, and stochastic weather patterns complicate decision making to minimize impacts on downstream ecosystems. Currently, hydropower management to meet water quali...

With the increasing demand for energy sources, a further development hydropower energy resource will be an inevitable choice for China’s resource strategy. The cascade hydropower station construction produced serious impacts on the regional eco-environment. The most obvious characteristics of impacts caused by the cascade hydropower plant development are progressive, cumulative and regional, wh...

Seeking the optimal strategy of a multi-reservoir system is an important approach to develop hydropower energy, in which the Genetic Algorithm (GA) is commonly used as an effective tool. However, when the traditional GA is applied in solving the problem, the constraints of water balance equation, hydraulic continuity relationship and power system load demand might be violated by the crossover a...

The management problem of water reservoirs can be formulated as a stochastic optimal control (SOC) problem, where the objective function is an aggregated cost that accounts for the interests acting in the water system (e.g. hydropower production, irrigation supply, etc.) and the design variable is the reservoirs release policy. Solving the SOC problem through stochastic dynamic programming is o...

Due to complex relations present in hydropower markets, and having in mind the specific role of hydropower in common electricity generation and transmission grid systems, it is impossible to identify a unified approach to hydropower plant management. The ever-changing market behavior also presents a problem for unification of methodologies and all this imposes the interpretation of hydropower p...