Sustainable model of hydro power development—Drina river case study

Abstract

The imperative of sustainability demands that every decision-making process in building and designing a hydro power system, analyzes the environmental, political, historical, cultural and other social impacts, besides the normal technical and economical concerns. Presently, most design processes incorporate impacts as non-technical criteria, through environmental and social impact assessment studies. These latter studies are mainly descriptive texts, conducted after all the technical optimizations of the design were completed and not always included within the optimization calculation. The main goal of this paper is to present the possibility for incorporating all the non-technical criteria as fuzzy mathematical functions in the optimization and decision-making process, right from the very first planning step, simultaneously and equally with other relevant, numerically presented, technical criteria. The idea was developed and tested on a practical example: the hydropower utilization of the Drina River between Foca and Gorazde, two towns in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a region with extreme environmental, political, historical, cultural and other social conflict. In spite of the restrictive environment, this part of the river has very high hydro potential, which is a renewable resource. Consideration of both the technical and non-technical criteria in the fuzzy optimized model, as presented in the paper, leads to novel project solutions. The final design consisting of three almost uniform dams plants: Sadba 362, Ustikolina 373 and Paunci 384, was proven to be sustainable for development as well as very similar to experts’ reasoning. The chosen optimal solution for hydro power development is a cascade consisting of three hydro power plants, instead of a single high dam, which might affect the environment and strongly disturb local communities.