Hydropower technology has traditionally been developed for high efficiency and availability. RenewHydro will research how to improve hydropower’s flexibility. Increasing the flexibility from hydropower will facilitate integration of VRE, while meeting power demand and grid requirements. On the technical side, this involves the development of advanced control systems, flexible operation modes, and the ability to quickly respond to grid imbalances, ensuring smooth integration with other renewable energy sources and maintaining grid stability. Furthermore, research in RenewHydro will increase technical flexibility by improving the performance at off-design conditions, improve efficiency, and increase the ramping rates and operational capacity in existing hydropower plants.

Consequently, there is a need for properly defining and exploring the role of hydropower as a flexibility provider considering market, technical and environmental aspects. Hydropower projects often involve multiple considerations and requirements. To weigh different trade-offs, it’s imperative to understand and quantify the various impacts, from the value of shifting energy at different time scales and the flexibility services provided to the grid, to the environmental impacts of flexible operation patterns. This project aims to describe hydropower as a flexibility provider considering multiple aspects to support decisions in hydropower expansion projects.

The goal is to develop measures and methods to quantify and compare different aspects of hydropower operations to provide insights into investment projects or revisions of concession terms. The developed metrics will be combined in a coherent decision support framework for assessing profitability and risk of investments in expansion projects enhancing sustainable flexibility services from hydropower.