Scholarly record

DESIGNING THE OPERATING RULES OF A RESERVOIR TO MAXIMISE THE FINANCIAL REVENUE FROM A HYDROPOWER PLANT: CASE STUDY OF MOSTISTE, CZECH REPUBLIC

Martin Bednář, Pavel Menšík, Daniel Marton

Abstract

Hydropower plants still hold globally the first position among the renewable resources in the production of electricity. They are one of the most environment-friendly way to generate electricity and thus waterpower is considered as a renewable resource with good prospects. A disadvantage of producing electricity from renewable resources is its problematic storage. Nevertheless, the water sources have a way to store electricity by water accumulation in the reservoir. This principle is used especially by the pumped storage hydropower plants. Is it possible to use this accumulation of water in a single water reservoir with the run-to-river hydropower plant and achieve higher financial revenue from the reservoir?s hydropower function? In this paper, the principle of the pumped storage hydropower plants is applied to the single reservoir with the run-to-river hydropower plant. The water accumulation in the upper reservoir is substituted with the operating rules, which increase and decrease the discharges from the reservoir with relation to the electricity price on the market in order to the highest revenue. Designed operating rules decrease the discharges from the reservoir in the period of low market electricity price and conversely increase the discharges in the period of high market electricity price. This leads to use the accumulated water from the low-price periods in the high-price periods. Microsoft Excel was used to develop the operating rules and via this software the analysis of the time series of the electricity market price and two simulation models were made. The operating rules design and testing were performed on the water reservoir Mostiste, Czech Republic. The reservoir is located in the middle east part of the Czech Republic. To develop the rules, the time series of the daily inflows to the reservoir and electricity market price progression from the period of 2008?2016 were used. Average daily inflows and prices from the year 2017 were then used for testing the designed operating rules. The results have shown that the operating rules make higher revenue from the reservoir?s hydropower function (up to 30 % in high flow years) without an unwanted decrease of the water level in comparison with current operating rules. The developed tool for designing the operating rules can be applicated on wide range of water reservoirs.

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