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| Titel |
The role of glaciers for Swiss hydropower production |
| VerfasserIn |
Bettina Schaefli, Pedro Manso, Mauro Fischer, Matthias Huss |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2016
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
en
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 18 (2016) |
| Datensatznummer |
250122561
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 EGU/EGU2016-1622.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| In Switzerland, hydropower represents over 50% of the total annual electricity production.
Given the Alpine setting of the country, this hydropower production (HPP) strongly relies on
the natural storage of discharge in form of ice and snow over months to decades. The
sensitivity of glacier-fed HPP systems with respect to climate change depends on how the
today’s production and the infrastructure design relies on the seasonal streamflow delay
expected from the natural storage effect of snow and ice. For low-head run-of-river HPP
plants built on large lowland rivers, the ongoing glacier retreat (resulting in strong summer
melt) currently sustains higher flows during summer months, an effect that will
certainly be reduced once the glaciers will have reached a critical size. This effect will
also modify the inflow to the large storage HPP plants that have been designed to
shift large amounts of meltwater inflows from summer to winter. The management
of these reservoirs will certainly have to be adapted to future inflow patterns. An
interesting case are high-head run-of-river plants (with heads from 100 to 1100
m) that short-circuit a given river reach. Future regime shifts with less sustained
summer flow and more concentrated spring melt flows might critically reduce the
annual production due to intake overflow during spring and reduced flow during
summer.
In this work, we discuss the role of glaciers for these different HPP types in detail,
including an overview of how glacier retreat might influence their production. This
comprehensive study synthesizes up-to-date estimations of glacier mass change since the
1980s and its influence on high Alpine discharge regimes and state-of-the art simulations of
potential future glacier discharge regimes. We also attempt an extrapolation to the country
level based on a hydropower GIS database that has been developed for economic
purposes. Ongoing Swiss research on sediment production and management might
complete this picture with the role of glacier sediment delivery for hydropower
operation. |
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