Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

In this proposal, we are requesting a CRD grant amounting to a total of $270,000 distributed over three years and four months from NSERC to supplement a Grant-in-Aid (GIA) agreement between BC Hydro (BCH) and the University of British Columbia. The grant will be used to support an ongoing phase in a long-term research program and to build upon and extend the work already completed using the previous NSERC CRDP 385615-09 grant. The overall objective is to develop a way of optimizing the operation of a large scale hydro system, such as BCH's, in close collaboration with the actual system operators and using their expertise and operational data sets. It is not possible to use a single technique to optimize the operation of the whole system as it is much too complex with too many planning and operational complexities and uncertainties. Instead, our approach is to develop a number of ""modules"" that address parts of the overall ""problem"", and that are useful in their own right for decision support, in the immediate term, but which fit within a comprehensive modeling and practical information flow framework for hydropower system operations. Feedback from BCH indicated that our approach have improved the methods and processes that are used in operations and in capital investments and have resulted in significant productivity and efficiency gains amounting to millions of dollars over the last several years. Other objectives of the GIA are to enhance the Civil Engineering program at UBC and strengthen collaboration between the UBC and BCH. We propose to continue these ""bridge-building"" activities and strengthen the collaborative research and development program through this application. The research component will focus on extending current and developing new ""modules"", that will help BCH system planners to operate the system at or near its maximum potential. In addition, we plan to build upon and extend the framework and expand our research program to address emerging policy issues and concerns such as climate change and integration of green and renewable sources of power and to develop a new systems-engineering approach to address risk and reliability of aging hydropower infrastructure systems.