Non-proportional Repartition Rules Optimize Environmental Flows and Energy Production

Pierre Razurel (), Lorenzo Gorla (), Benoît Crouzy () and Paolo Perona ()
Additional contact information
Pierre Razurel: Group AHEAD, Institute of Environmental Engineering, EPFL-ENAC Lausanne, CH
Lorenzo Gorla: Group AHEAD, Institute of Environmental Engineering, EPFL-ENAC Lausanne, CH
Benoît Crouzy: Group AHEAD, Institute of Environmental Engineering, EPFL-ENAC Lausanne, CH
Paolo Perona: Group AHEAD, Institute of Environmental Engineering, EPFL-ENAC Lausanne, CH

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2016, vol. 30, issue 1, No 13, 207-223

Abstract: Abstract In order to meet the growing demand for energy, the development of hydropower leads to an increase of the river exploitation by human activities. Thereby, water management has become a major issue in the energy transition. A better definition of the flow release rules is now required to improve the Minimal Flow Requirement (MFR) concept, which has long been used in spite of its environmental inconsistency. In this work, we present a class of non-proportional redistribution rules that broadens the spectrum of dynamic flow releases based on proportional redistribution for run-of-the-river power plants. We adapt the mathematical form of the Fermi-Dirac statistical distribution to engineer a novel class of redistribution functions. In particular, such functions are used to define the fraction of water allocated to the environment depending on the inflow at the intake. The theoretical background as well as the economic interpretation is presented, and the ability to generate variable flow releases carefully discussed. MFR, proportional and non-proportional distribution policies are then applied to a real case study and their respective economic and environmental efficiencies quantitatively compared. We show that non-proportional distribution policies allow for operating conditions actually close to the Pareto frontier, which improve both efficiencies with respect to those obtained from some traditional MFR and proportional policies.

Keywords: Dynamic environmental flows; River regulation; Optimal water allocation; Sustainable water management; Flow regimes; Small hydropower (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11269-015-1156-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:waterr:v:30:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1007_s11269-015-1156-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11269

DOI: 10.1007/s11269-015-1156-y

Access Statistics for this article

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) is currently edited by G. Tsakiris

More articles in Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) from Springer, European Water Resources Association (EWRA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().