Full Title: Hydropower Value Drivers
Author(s): Todd Levin, Abhishek Somani, Konstantinos Oikonomou, Sohom Datta, Nader Samaan, Siby Plathottam, Zhi Zhou, Matthew Mahalik, Thomas Veselka, Quentin Ploussard, Jonghwan Kwon, Haolin Yang, Allison M. Campbell, Wiwin Hartini, Gregory Stark, and Greg Brinkman
Publisher(s): U.S. Department of Energy
Publication Date: July 22, 2023
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
In April 2019, WPTO launched the HydroWIRES Initiative to understand, enable, and improve hydropower and pumped storage hydropower’s (PSH’s) contributions to reliability, resilience, and integration in the rapidly evolving U.S. electricity system. The unique characteristics of hydropower, including PSH, make it well suited to provide a range of storage, generation flexibility, and other grid services to support the cost-effective integration of variable renewable resources. The U.S. electricity system is rapidly evolving, bringing both opportunities and challenges for the hydropower sector. While increasing deployment of variable renewables such as wind and solar have enabled low-cost, clean energy in many U.S. regions, it has also created a need for resources that can store energy or quickly change their operations to ensure a reliable and resilient grid. Hydropower (including PSH) is not only a supplier of bulk, low-cost, renewable energy but also a source of large-scale flexibility and a force multiplier for other renewable power generation sources. Realizing this potential requires innovation in several areas: understanding value drivers for hydropower in evolving system conditions, describing flexible capabilities and associated tradeoffs associated with hydropower meeting system needs, optimizing hydropower operations and planning, and developing innovative technologies that enable hydropower to operate more flexibly.
HydroWIRES is distinguished in its close engagement with the DOE National Laboratories. Five national laboratories—Argonne National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory—work as a team to provide strategic insight and develop connections across the HydroWIRES portfolio as well as broader DOE and National Laboratory efforts such as the Grid Modernization Initiative