WebinarImpact of Water Availability on the Grid of the Future
May 13, 2025 • Webex
We are pleased to announce that we have scheduled a webinar on “Impact of Water Availability on the Grid of the Future” for Tuesday, May 13th, at 1 p.m. ET, presented by Soumyadeep Nag, a Postdoctoral Researcher (Energy Systems) and Shafiul Alam at USDOE—Idaho National Laboratory and Slaven Kincic of PNNL.About the Presentation:This is a joint project led by PNNL, involving multiple national labs, funded by WPTO starting in 2021 and extended for another 3 years, presenting simulations that have been performed by INL.As renewable, yet non-dispatchable energy resources continue to replace carbon-emitting generation plants, more reliance will be placed on hydro-based generation to provide ancillary services as well as baseload generation in absence of such generations. This ultimately demands for all-inclusive studies of hydropower generation for power system operation and planning. Power system steady-state and dynamic models, and study software are keystones to perform planning and operational system studies. Currently, hydro-based generation representation in such software and models, accounts for nominal water availability only, leading to inaccurate generation dispatch and dynamic response with respect to water conditions in watersheds. Moreover, the existing hydropower models do not capture environmental constraints, such as maximum and minimum headwater elevation, and minimum instantaneous and average flows. The presented work focuses on developing methods to capture the impact of variations in water availability. This work is divided into 3 phasesa) development of tools and procedures for aggregating hydropower data and modifying power system model files, b) development of new power system model files (dynamic and steady-state) representing reduced water availability c) examination of the impact of regional water availability reduction on the Western U.S. power system using N-1 contingency analysis, cascading failure analysis and dynamic simulation techniques. Incorporating regional water availability into the power system simulation has revealed the reliability and resiliency implications of hydropower generation, which would otherwise remain unnoticed during operation and planning studies. Specifically, any reduction in the water availability leads to a) change in the number, severity and type of power system thermal, voltage and stability violations during contingencies, as compared to nominal water availability, b) change in number, depth and severity of cascading failures, and c) higher deviations in key power system parameters such as frequency and voltage during high impact dynamic events.