scholarly journals Using Cellular Automata Approach to Optimize the Hydropower Reservoir Operation of Folsom Dam

Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 1851
Author(s):  
Erfan Goharian ◽  
Mohammad Azizipour ◽  
Samuel Sandoval-Solis ◽  
Graham Fogg

While hydropower in California is one the main sources of renewable energy, population growth has continuously increased demand for energy. In addition, recent droughts reduced the amount of available water behind the hydropower dams to provide the water head needed to run the turbines in hydropower plants. A more sustainable alternative, instead of developing new infrastructure, is to enhance the daily operation of reservoirs to support hydropower generation. This study suggests a new optimal operation policy for Folsom Reservoir in California and hydropower plants, which maximizes hydropower generation and reduces flood risk. This study demonstrates the application of the cellular automata (CeA) approach to optimize the daily hydropower operation of Folsom Reservoir. The reservoir operation is a nonlinear problem, where the hydropower generation and elevation-area-storage functions are the main nonlinearity to accurately represent the daily operation of the system. Moreover, the performance of the CeA approach under two extreme climate conditions, wet and dry, was evaluated and compared to the operation during normal conditions. Results showed that the CeA approach provides more efficient solutions in comparison to the commonly used evolutionary optimization algorithms. For the size of the non-linear optimization problem designed in this study, CeA outperformed genetic algorithm for finding optimal solutions for different climate conditions. Results of CeA showed that although the annual average inflow to the reservoir during the dry period was about 30% less than the normal condition, CeA offered about a 20% reduction in average hydropower generation. The new operation policy offered by CeA can partly compensate for the loss of the snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada under a warming climate. The approach and its outcomes support an informed decision-making process and provide practical reservoir operational guideline to remediate the adverse effects of hydroclimatic changes in the future.

Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 2114
Author(s):  
Yuni Xu ◽  
Yu Hui

To balance the water demands of different departments and produce a win–win result for reservoir operation, a series of conflict-resolution methods have been developed to define the socio-optimal operation strategy for specific conflict problems. However, given the inherent uncertainty of reservoir operation brought by climate change, the compromised strategies selected by conflict-resolution methods can vary. Therefore, quantifying the impacts of climate change on the decision characteristics of conflict-resolution methods can help to address questions about whether conflict-resolution decisions are sustainable given unforeseen changes. In this study, the Yangtze River is regarded as study area. As a world-class hydropower project located on the midstream of Yangtze River, Three Gorges Hydroelectric Power Station can transfer plenty of water energy into electricity. To alleviate the ecological water shortage caused by hydropower operation, sustainable and balanced operation strategies considering the water demands of two departments needs to be studied. In the context of hydropower-environmental conflict-resolution management, the decision behaviors of two fuzzy social choice methods and four game-theoretical bargaining methods under 25 kinds of future climate scenarios are analyzed. Comparing the strategy selection results of different methods for a future period (2021–2082) shows that in all proposed climate scenarios, the decisions of the Nash bargaining method, alternating offer method, and unanimity fallback bargaining method in game-theoretical bargaining methods are more stable than other studied methods, which means that climate change affects the decision behaviors of these three methods slightly. In addition, balanced strategies selected by these three methods could formulate adaptable reservoir operation policies that would satisfy the interests of hydropower and environmental stakeholders equally, and avoid a very low satisfaction level of individual stakeholder and whole stakeholders in the water-conflict year. Therefore, against the background of an increasing demand for environmental protection, these three methods can provide socio-optimal strategies considering social and economic benefits for water resource management.


Author(s):  
Chen Wu ◽  
Yibo Wang ◽  
Jing Ji ◽  
Pan Liu ◽  
Liping Li ◽  
...  

Reservoirs play important roles in hydropower generation, flood control, water supply, and navigation. However, the regulation of reservoirs is challenged due to their adverse influences on river ecosystems. This study uses ecoflow as an ecological indicator for reservoir operation to indicate the extent of natural flow alteration. Three reservoir optimization models are established to derive ecological operating rule curves. Model 1 only considers the maximization of average annual hydropower generation and the assurance rate of hydropower generation. Model 2 incorporates ecological objectives and constraints. Model 3 not only considers the hydropower objectives but also simulates the runoff and calculates the ecological indicator values of multiple downstream stations. The three models are optimized by a simulation-optimization framework. The reservoir ecological operating rule curves are derived for the case study of China's Three Gorges Reservoir. The results represent feasible schemes for reservoir operation by considering both hydropower and ecological demands. The average annual power generation and assurance rate of a preferred optimized scheme for Model 3 are increased by 1.06% and 2.50%, respectively. Furthermore, ecological benefits of the three hydrologic stations are also improved. In summary, the ecological indicator ecoflow and optimization models could be helpful for reservoir ecological operations.


Author(s):  
Yang Yu ◽  
Peifang Wang ◽  
Chao Wang ◽  
Xun Wang ◽  
Bin Hu

The construction of multifunction reservoirs is important for flood control, agriculture irrigation, navigation, and hydropower generation, but dam construction will inevitably affect the downstream flow and sediment regimes, which can cause some environmental and ecological consequences. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a framework for assessing the multiobjective reservoir operation model based on environmental flows for sustaining the suspended sediment concentration (SSC) requirements in the turbidity maximum zone (TMZ). The Yangtze River Estuary was used as a case study. Through using an analytical model, a quantitative correlation between SSC and water flow rate was established. Then, the quantitative correlation and the SSC requirements were applied to determine the environmental flows for the estuarine TMZ. Subsequently, a multiobjective reservoir operation model was developed for the Three Gorges Reservoir (TGR), and an improved nondominated sorting genetic algorithm III based on elimination operator was applied to the model. An uncertainty analysis and a comparative analysis were used to assess the model’s performance. The results showed that the proposed multiobjective reservoir operation model can reduce ecological deficiency under wet, normal, and dry years by 33.65%, 35.95%, and 20.98%, with the corresponding hydropower generation output lost by 3.37%, 3.88%, and 2.95%, respectively. Finally, we discussed ecological satiety rates under optimized and practical operation of the TGR in wet, normal, and dry years. It indicated that the multiobjective-optimized runoff performs better at maintaining the TMZ in the Yangtze River Estuary than practical runoff. More importantly, the results can offer guidance for the management of the TGR to improve the comprehensive development and protection of the estuarine ecological environment.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Razvan Garbea ◽  
Florina Scarlatache ◽  
Gheorghe Grigoras ◽  
Bogdan-Constantin Neagu

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 1396-1404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edris Ahmadebrahimpour

Abstract Optimizing hydropower plants is complex due to nonlinearity, complexity, and multidimensionality. This study introduces and evaluates the performance of the Wolf Search Algorithm (WSA) for optimizing the operation of a four-reservoir system and a single hydropower system in Iran. Results indicate WSA could reach 99.95 and 99.91 percent of the global optimum for the four-reservoir system and single reservoir system, respectively. Comparing the results of WSA with a genetic algorithm (GA) also indicates WSA's supremacy over GA. Thus, due to its simple structure and high capability, WSA is recommended for use in other water resources management problems.


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