Tag Archives: hydropower

How to choose a water system model

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The California Water & Environmental Modeling Forum (CWEMF) has proposed to update its water modeling protocol guidance, last issued in 2000. This modeling protocol applies to many other settings, including electricity production and planning (which I am familiar with). I led the review of electricity system simulation models for the California Energy Commission, and asked many of these questions then.

Questions that should be addressed in water system modeling include:

  • Models can be used for either short-term operational or long term planning purposes—models rarely can serve both masters. The model should be chosen for its analytic focus is on predicting with accuracy and/or precision a particular outcome (usually for short term operations) or identifying resilience and sustainability.
  • There can be a trade off between accuracy and precision. And focusing overly so on precision in one aspect of a model is unlikely to improve the overall accuracy of the model due to the lack of precision elsewhere. In addition, increased precision also increases processing time, thus slowing output and flexibility.
  • A model should be able to produce multiple outcomes quickly as a “scenario generator” for analyzing uncertainty, risk and vulnerability. The model should be tested for accuracy when relaxing key constraints that increase processing time. For example, in an electricity production model, relaxing the unit commitment algorithm increased processing speed twelve fold while losing only 7 percent in accuracy, mostly in the extreme tail cases.
  • Water models should be able to use different water condition sequences rather than relying on historic traces. In the latter case, models may operate as though the future is known with certainty.
  • Water management models should include the full set of opportunity costs for water supply, power generation, flood protection and groundwater pumping. This implies that some type of linkage should exist between these types of models.

Using floods to replenish groundwater

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ALMOND ORCHARD FLOODING

M.Cubed produced four reports for Sustainable Conservation on using floodwaters to recharge aquifers in California’s Central Valley. The first is on expected costs. The next three are a set on the benefits, participation incentives and financing options for using floodwaters in wetter years to replenish groundwater aquifers. We found that costs would range around $100 per acre-foot, and beneficiaries include not only local farmers, but also downstream communities with lower flood control costs, upstream water users with more space for storage instead of flood control, increased hydropower generation, and more streamside habitat. We discussed several different approaches to incentives based on our experience in a range of market-based regulatory settings and the water transfer market.

With the PPIC’s release of Water and the Future of the San Joaquin Valley, which forecasts a loss of 500,000 acres of agricultural production due to reduced groundwater pumping under the State Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), local solutions that mitigate groundwater restrictions should be moving to the fore.

Don Cameron at Terranova Ranch started doing this deliberately earlier this decade, and working with Phil Bachand and UC Davis, more study has shown the effectiveness, and the lack of risk to crops, from this strategy. The Department of Water Resources has implemented the Flood-MAR program to explore this alternative further. The Flood-MAR whitepaper explores many of these issues, but its list of beneficiaries is incomplete, and the program appears to not yet moved on to how to effectively implement these programs integrated with the local SGMA plans. Our white papers could be useful starting points for that discussion.

(Image Source: Chico Enterprise-Record)

 

 

 

Looking for pumped storage in all the wrong places

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castaic_power_plant

LADWP is proposing to spend $3 billion on a pumped storage facility at the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. Yet, LADWP has not been using extensively its aging 1,247 MW Castaic pumped storage plant on the State Water Project in the pumping recovery mode. Instead, LADWP runs it more like a standard hydropower plant, and uses pumping to supplement and extend the peak power generation, rather than using it to store excess day time power. And the SWP’s 759 MW pumped storage plant at the Hyatt-Thermalito powerhouse at Lake Oroville has been not been used effectively for decades.

The more prudent course would seem to be to focus on refurbishing and updating existing facilities, with variable speed pumps for example, to deliver utility scale storage that can capture excess renewable energy generation nearer large load centers. The State Water Contractors should be incented to upgrade these facilities through contracts with the state’s electric utilities. Unfortunately, no direct market mechanism exists to provide a true value for these resources so long at the California Public Utilities Commission and the California Independent System Operator avoid developing full pricing. As it stands, the current pricing scheme socializes and subsidizes a number of electricity services such as transmission, unit commitment decisions, and reliability services.

Repost: Wind capacity blows past hydro to become most plentiful US renewable | Utility Dive

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Installed wind capacity is more than 82,000 MW, according to a trade group, making it the nation’s largest renewable resource ahead of hydro.

Source: Wind capacity blows past hydro to become most plentiful US renewable | Utility Dive

An economically attractive environmental solution in peril

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The agreement to take down PacifiCorp’s dams on the Klamath River is in peril. In 2006 we showed in a study funded by the California Energy Commission that decommissioning the dams would likely cost PacifiCorps ratepayers about the same as relicensing. That mitigated the economic argument and opened up the negotiations among the power company, farmers, tribes, environmentalists and government agencies to came to an agreement in 2010 to start decommissioning by 2020.

The agreement required Congress to act by the end of 2015 and that deadline is looming. Unfortunately, there are still opponents who mistakenly believe that the project’s hydropower is cheaper than the alternatives. In fact, the economics are even more favorable today whether PacifiCorp uses natural gas or renewables to replace the lost power. And this analysis ignores the benefits to the Klamath fisheries from decommissioning. It’s too bad that bad simplistic economics can still get traction in the legislative process.