Hydropower

[asolavi]

• [X] Hydropower Annual Production Computation.
• [ ] Hydropower Annual Production Analysis: what are the outputs of the above? Does it match the data we have? Do we need to make adjustments?
• [ ] Hydropower Flow Validation Computation: ongoing. Difficulties found at understanding the units in which inflows are expressed and converted to MWh. Possible solution: Retrieve the raw inflow data (from ERA5 dataset) from pypsa-earth. This should be in the rule build_renewable_profiles. See also build_renewable_profiles.ipynb for more info on how hydro computations are done in pypsa-earth. That documentation of the dataset is: https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/reanalysis-era5-single-levels?tab=overview (look for variable "runoff").
• [ ] write section in validation report

More details on the proposed metrics to validate hydropower:

• [X] Installed Power Capacity or “Nameplate Capacity” (unit: MW or GW) -> done in the “Installed Capacity Validation”.

• [ ] Storage Capacity (unit: MWh or GWh).

• [ ] Hydropower Potential. The hydropower potential should be evaluated in installed power capacity (unit: MW or GW), and/or in storage capacity (unit: MWh or GWh). @asolavi: It might be that only storage capacity potential is sensible to analyse, in the sense that one can put quite a few turbines in a hydropower station, increasing the power capacity significantly. On the other hand, the suitable places to build dams and the associated capacities do have a clear limit. To be discussed.

• [ ] Capacity Factor

• [ ] Water Inflows (unit: m^3 of water (or equivalent water unit) and/or MWh (or GWh)). @AnasAbuzayed @tacwebservices issue resolved here? @asolavi: yearly water inflows and capacity factors describe similar features. For hydro, water inflows might be a more natural metric.

• [ ] Annual Generation (unit: MWh or GWh) -> This is an output of our model. Leave it for result analysis?

[asolavi]

Notes on the to-do items (learn in a hydro-stream meeting with Davide, thanks!):

1. Storage Capacity: Hydro dams can have different storage capacities. If data is available, they are specified in powerplant.csv. If data is not available, the default from the config file is used. It is also rescaled to match annual statistics. Hence, we can introduced a customized powerplant.csv with the right data.

2. Hydropower potential: Usually, hydropower plants are not expandable. Technically, it can be added, but the feature needs to be tested. Would also need of a global data-base on hydropower projects. Possible way around for this project (thanks again, Davide!):

• Add ghost hydropower plants at those nodes that are expandable, with capacity 0 on the first year. Make those ghost plants expandable.
• Be careful on whether hydropower expansion is enabled.

3. Inflow validation proposed approach: Global Runoff Data Base vs Atlite (standalone, not pypsa-earth) vs ZESCO data (if we get it):

• Download runoff for a GPS location with GRDC

• Create an atlite cutout for the region of interest and the same time period of the measurement

• Create with atlite a runoff using the hydro function for the gps location of interest. See more details here.

• Notebook that may help: https://atlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/examples/historic-comparison-germany.html

• Compare the time series.

[AnasAbuzayed]

The validation is done, still to be done is a comparison with actual (new) values, as PyPSA-Earth uses 2013 as a benchmark year.