Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

Hydroelectric power generation is one of Canada's most important assets, covering over 60% of the country's total electricity demand. In the near future, some of the oil-based demand will transition to electricity due to the mass-marketing of electric vehicles and shift to electric public transit. This will exert supplementary pressure on the electricity demand in Canada. This project aims to identify areas of improvement in the operation of hydroelectric power generation systems and develop tools to measure the effects of proposed improvements. More specifically, this project aims to improve the value chain of the hydroelectric power generation operations. This includes gathering as much information as possible from the short-term and medium-term weather forecasts and observed climatology, transforming that information into the best possible estimates of future inflows to hydropower reservoirs and then making the optimal water releases from the reservoirs. This multi-step process is stochastic in nature and probabilistic approaches will have to be implemented and improved upon to attain the objective. The novelty of this project lies in the skill evaluation of multiple combinations of forecasting tools and quantifying the improvements using a hydropower system simulator. The proposed research and simulation tools will be developed and investigated for a 4-reservoir, 6-generating station hydropower system in central Québec which is operated by Rio Tinto for its aluminium smelting plants. Derivatives of this system will also be independently investigated, such as by adding or removing reservoirs, which will allow generalizing the results to different hydropower arrangements.