Hydropower Planning

Next Generation Stochastic Hydropower Optimization

Hydropower planning today not only faces uncertainty about natural inflows but also uncertainty about the evolution of electricity prices. Longer dry seasons, trading across multiple power markets, participation in the balancing markets and increasing complexity of contracts used for hedging production, of this turns hydropower operation into an increasingly challenging task.

Taking full advantage of QUASAR®’s advanced solver technology, Quantego has developed the most flexible and detailed stochastic optimization model for hydropower planning available today.

What's inside the software?

KEY FEATURES

  • Hourly time resolution over multiple years
  • Optimal water values for reservoir cascades
  • Joint model of hourly price and inflow risk
  • Optimal dispatch schedule for turbines and pumps
  • Highly customizable model and interactive dashboard
  • Rapidly deployed and securely hosted on AWS VPC
  • Automate repeated optimization tasks
  • Fully integrated in the QUASAR® Cloud platform

  A detailed model of hydropower operation

Quantego’s hydropower planning model consists of an integrated price and inflow model and a decision model.

  • The price and inflow model captures (a) spatial and temporal correlation of natural inflows into multiple reservoirs, (b) fundamental factors and calendar effects, and (c) spot price mean reversion and price spikes.
  • The decision model captures (a) multiple interconnected reservoirs, (b) calendar-based limits of storages, turbines, spillways, and pumps, (c) head effects and run-of-the-river power generation, (d) reserve constraints of balance groups, (e) hourly spot trading.

  A ready-to-use graphical user interface

The model is available as ready-to-use yet highly customizable software solution deployed through QUASAR® Cloud.

Users can import and manage input data, execute optimization runs, calculate water values and delta positions, create interactive charts and reports, as well as export result data and easily share it across the organization. QUASAR® Cloud can be obtained as subscription service or set up on-premise via AWS VPC. Learn more about QUASAR Cloud

  The world's most powerful stochastic programming solver

The model is driven by the powerful QUASAR® stochastic programming solver that combines the latest advancements in machine learning and mathematical optimization. QUASAR®’s highly efficient algorithms can solve the most complex stochastic-dynamic programming problems with hundreds of time stages, thousands of variables and millions of possible outcomes at an unprecedented speed. Learn more about QUASAR

 

Success Story

Austria’s largest power company, VERBUND, uses QUASAR® for medium-term planning of several interconnected reservoirs, hydropower stations, and run-of-the-river plants, in hourly time resolution. The model considers uncertainty of hourly spot prices as well as natural inflows over a 3-year planning horizon, which has been impossible with existing planning tools before.

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What are the benefits?

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Profitability increase and risk reduction

  • More robust dispatch decisions of hydropower stations
  • Calculate water values that take all details into account
  • Reduce the risk of over-hedging during dry seasons

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Risk management and compliance

  • Follow best practices in asset optimization
  • Hourly delta positions for high resolution hedge plans
  • Calculate value-at-risk and cashflow-at-risk

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Automated monitoring and reporting

  • Dispatch recommendations and reservoir content scenarios
  • Provide dispatchers with accurate water values for their reservoirs
  • Value-at-risk and cashflow-at-risk for different hedging strategies

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Hosted on QUASAR® Cloud

  • Unify multiple models and its data on one platform
  • Customizable model and reports
  • Automate repeated optimization tasks
  • Share model output as interactive reports across the organization

What our clients say

The sheer size of our reservoir makes it necessary that our hydropower storage assets must be managed over the medium term, when there is still significant uncertainty about future hydrologic inflows and power prices. Our asset management therefore clearly benefits from stochastic modeling, but only with QUASAR, we are able to solve the stochastic optimization problem in hourly time steps over a three-year planning horizon.
Dr. Andreas Eichhorn
Portfolio Management at VERBUND Trading, Austria

More Information and Resources

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