Valued peaks: Sustainable water allocation for small hydropower plants in an era of explicit ecological needs

Faisal Bin Ashraf, Hannu Huuki, Ali Torabi Haghighi, Artti Juutinen, Atso Romakkaniemi and Hannu Marttila

Renewable Energy, 2025, vol. 244, issue C

Abstract: Optimizing hydropower operations to balance economic profitability and support functioning ecosystem services is integral to river management policy. In this article, we propose a dynamic, constrained optimization framework for small hydropower plants (SHPs) to evaluate trade-offs between economic profitability and socio-ecological requirements. Specifically, we examine the balance between short-term losses in hydropower generation and the potential for compensatory benefits in the form of revenue from recreational ecosystem services, irrespective of the direct beneficiary. Our framework integrates a fish habitat model, a hydropower optimization model, and a recreational ecosystem service estimate to evaluate different environmental flow scenarios. The optimization process gives three outflow release scenarios, informed by previous streamflow realisations (dam inflow), and designed environmental flow constraints. The framework is applied and tested for the river Kuusinkijoki in North-eastern Finland, which is a habitat for migratory brown trout and grayling populations. We show that the revenue loss due to the environmental flow constraints arises through a reduction in revenue per generated energy unit and through a reduction in turbine efficiency. Additionally, the simulation results reveal that all the designed environmental flow constraints cannot be met simultaneously. Under the environmental flow scenario with both minimum flow and flow ramping rate constraints, the annual hydropower revenue decreases by 16.5 %. An annual increase of 8 % in recreational fishing visits offsets the revenue loss. The developed framework provides knowledge of the costs and benefits of hydropower environmental flow constraints and guides the prioritizing process of environmental measures.

Keywords: Small hydropower; Ecological flow constraints; Hydropower optimization; Sustainable energy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148125004185
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:renene:v:244:y:2025:i:c:s0960148125004185

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2025.122756

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

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