Demonstration of sustainable hydropower refurbishment

Project Information

ReHydro

Grant agreement ID: 101147310

DOI

10.3030/101147310

EC signature date 23 April 2024

Start date 1 May 2024

End date 30 April 2028

Funded under

• Climate, Energy and Mobility

Total cost

No data

EU contribution

€ 7 506 337,43

Coordinated by

SINTEF ENERGI AS
Norway

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ReHydro (Demonstration of sustainable hydropower refurbishment)

Reporting period: 2024-05-01 to 2025-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Hydropower and storage capacity needs to increase to meet the need for renewable and dispatchable power generation. According to IEA, worldwide hydro power capacity should increase from 1360 GW in 2021 to 1563–1782 GW by 2030 and up to over 2500 GW in 2050. At the same time, hydropower refurbishment must implement modern sustainability standards preserving biodiversity and contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation.

The main objective of ReHydro is to demonstrate how European hydropower can be refurbished and modernized to be fit for a leading role in the future power system respecting sustainability requirements and societal needs in a climate change context. A suite of monitoring and digital tools (performance, cavitation, machine health) implemented at demonstration sites, will improve hydropower efficiency. Innovative concepts like retrofitting by pumped hydro and hybridization will make hydropower fit for future markets.

ReHydro will demonstrate how biodiversity can be improved with new fish-friendly turbines, re-establishment of environmental flows, monitored using new tools such as eDNA. Smarter use of water resources will also be implemented, so that more services can be delivered to the power markets, while multi-purpose use of the water resources for navigation and recreation can be expanded and the ability to mitigate flooding and draughts are strengthened.

The results from ReHydro will achieve all the expected outcomes specified in the call, and the solutions will give European hydropower industries commercial advantages to utilise the global need for hydropower expansion. It is expected that ReHydro's exploitable results will create 700–1150 new jobs in the manufacturing industry, increasing the global market by 275 mill euros.

ReHydro will introduce a new paradigm to boost European leadership and competitiveness in the hydropower industry and provide new sustainable solutions that are replicable at European and global levels.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The main scientific achievements are related to establishing online monitoring systems and online measurements in technical installations at several demonstration sites. These monitoring systems enables detailed measurements of turbine performance, cavitation and sediment abrasion of turbines, as well as river flows for improved operation, efficiency and maintenance of hydropower plants. Analysis of detailed measurements requires advanced algorithms and the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning and digital twins that are now implemented in ReHydro.

A survey among 47 per cent of the European hydropower fleet shows that modernisation is driven by the necessity to keep the asset productive. Energy production remains the main source of revenues on the markets, while flexibility might drive more investments in the future. Increasing hydropower flexibility and being able to operate in different markets are key challenges in ReHydro.

Hybridization between run-of-river hydropower and batteries are being analysed in a cascade of several hydropower plants to increase flexible operations without increasing the wear and tear of hydraulic machines. A detailed hydropower scheduling model has been developed to enable the user to operate in different markets are now tested by one of the hydropower companies in ReHydro.

The implementation of environmental flows and improved water temperature control in hydropower rivers are being analysed in two bypassed rivers and several river sections downstream hydropower plants by applying both advanced and simplified modelling tools.

Hydropower rivers are also providing services to the society by climate change adaptation, recreational possibilities, navigation and ecosystem services. ReHydro are investigating implementation and improvements of these services by making river flow data publicly available, analysing how to prevent bank erosion in a navigable river as well as developing an analytical framework with a set of indicators to evaluate services to the society.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

ReHydro has enabled a continuous quantification of hydro-abrasive erosion without disturbing operation by computer vision technologies that can identify and quantify damaged zones from static images. This will provide a sound basis for decision-making and enrich the capabilities of digitalisation tools, advancing the state-of-the-art.

Previous research has developed digital tools to assess hydropower plant health, but it did not include sediment and cavitation erosion or performance degradation. ReHydro has improved and demonstrated digitalization tools supporting smart decision-making for sustainable refurbishment by analysing and investigating additional sensor information for cavitation.

Existing digital control of hybrid technology did not include hydropeaking mitigation and water management. ReHydro has now improved multi-objective optimization that includes these assets in addition to control the combination of batteries and hydropower generation.

Today, there is no off-the-shelf hydropower scheduling tool capable of fully optimising uncertainty and operation in multiple markets. ReHydro has added a multi-market methodology tool to the hydropower scheduling model ProdRisk, enabling calculation of revenue streams from multiple markets. These functions in ProdRisk are being tested in Switzerland.

Life-cycle analysis (LCA) is a mature and recognised methodology to evaluate potential environmental impacts on the whole life cycle of a product. However, there are no standard methodologies to apply LCA for biodiversity impacts of hydropower. ReHydro are in the process of establishing and verifying indicators for biodiversity assessment in LCA for hydropower.

We expect more results beyond the state-of-the-art to be achieved in the next reporting periods.