Energy crisis in Brazil: Impact of hydropower reservoir level on the river flow

Julian David Hunt, Andreas Nascimento, Carla Schwengber ten Caten, Fernanda Munari Caputo Tomé, Paulo Smith Schneider, André Luis Ribeiro Thomazoni, Nivalde José de Castro, Roberto Brandão, Marcos Aurélio Vasconcelos de Freitas, José Sidnei Colombo Martini, Dorel Soares Ramos and Rodrigo Senne

Energy, 2022, vol. 239, issue PA

Abstract: Water management strategies can have considerable impacts on the regional climate and hydrology. It is usually the case that the construction and operation of hydropower reduce the river flow downstream due to the increase in evaporation. However, this paper shows that in humid regions, such as in Brazil, the hydropower storage reservoirs contribute to increase the flow of the river. This observation has been tested with historical reservoir levels and river flow data from several dams in Brazil. It was found that the operation of reservoirs in Brazil has a considerable impact on its river flows. The higher the storage level at the beginning of the humid period, the higher the river flow during the wet period. The paper proposes strategies to allow the reservoirs to fill up and to maintain the reservoirs filled in the future, with the intention of increasing hydropower generation and reducing the intermittency of other renewable energy sources.

Keywords: Hydropower; Regional climate; Water management; Drought (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544221021757
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:239:y:2022:i:pa:s0360544221021757

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2021.121927

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().