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| Titel |
Balancing hydropower production and river bed incision in operating a run-of-river hydropower scheme along the River Po |
| VerfasserIn |
Simona Denaro, Quang Dinh, Simone Bizzi, Dario Bernardi, Sara Pavan, Andrea Castelletti, Leonardo Schippa, Rodolfo Soncini-Sessa |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2013
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 15 (2013) |
| Datensatznummer |
250084657
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Water management through dams and reservoirs is worldwide necessary to support key
human-related activities ranging from hydropower production to water allocation, and flood
risk mitigation. Reservoir operations are commonly planned in order to maximize these
objectives. However reservoirs strongly influence river geomorphic processes causing
sediment deficit downstream, altering the flow regime, leading, often, to process of river bed
incision: for instance the variations of river cross sections over few years can notably affect
hydropower production, flood mitigation, water supply strategies and eco-hydrological
processes of the freshwater ecosystem.
The river Po (a major Italian river) has experienced severe bed incision in the last
decades. For this reason infrastructure stability has been negatively affected, and capacity to
derive water decreased, navigation, fishing and tourism are suffering economic damages, not
to mention the impact on the environment.
Our case study analyzes the management of Isola Serafini hydropower plant located on
the main Po river course. The plant has a major impact to the geomorphic river processes
downstream, affecting sediment supply, connectivity (stopping sediment upstream the dam)
and transport capacity (altering the flow regime). Current operation policy aims at
maximizing hydropower production neglecting the effects in term of geomorphic processes.
A new improved policy should also consider controlling downstream river bed incision. The
aim of this research is to find suitable modeling framework to identify an operating
policy for Isola Serafini reservoir able to provide an optimal trade-off between
these two conflicting objectives: hydropower production and river bed incision
downstream.
A multi-objective simulation-based optimization framework is adopted. The operating
policy is parameterized as a piecewise linear function and the parameters optimized using an
interactive response surface approach. Global and local response surface are comparatively
assessed. Preliminary results show that a range of potentially interesting trade-off policies
exist able to better control river bed incision downstream without significantly decreasing
hydropower production. |
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