Investigation of climate change impacts on hydropower generation: the case of a run-of-river small hydropower plant in North Western Greece

Abstract

Services and uses arising from surface water‘s availability, such as hydropower production, are bound to be affected by climate change. The object of the research is to evaluate climate change impacts on energy generation produced by run-of-river small hydropower plants with the use of future river discharges derived from two up-to-date Regional Climate Models. For doing so, the hydropower simulation model HEC-ResSim, calibrated and validated over real power data, was used to simulate the generated energy in the two future periods of 2031-2060 and 2071-2100. The future river discharges in the case study area are derived from the hydrological model E-HYPE that uses as forcing the climatic variables of the CSC-REMO2009-MPI-ESM-LR and KNMI-RACMO22E-EC-EARTH climate models under two Representative Concentration Pathways, namely RCP4.5 and RCP8.5. The research outputs demonstrate a decrease of the generated energy varying from 2.86% to 25.79% in comparison to the reference period of 1971-2000. However, in most of the simulated scenarios the decrease is less than 10.0%, while increased energy production is projected for one of the scenarios. Overall, it can be concluded that the case study run-of-river small hydropower plant will be marginally affected by climate change when the decrease of the relevant river discharges is up to 10-15%.