Assessing Climate Impacts on Hydropower Production: The Case of the Toce River Basin

Climate

Giovanni Ravazzani¹  Marco Mancini¹  Francesco Dalla Valle²  Ludovic Gaudard³  Andreas Gobiet⁴  Thomas Mendlik⁴ 

[1] Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milan 20133, Italy;ENEL S.p.A.-Energy Management Division, Mestre 30172, Italy;Institute for Environmental Sciences, University of Geneva, Geneva 1205, Switzerland;Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change (WEGC), University of Graz, Graz 8010, Austria;

关键词: alpine basin;    climate change;    hydrological impact;    hydropower production;   

DOI  :  10.3390/cli4020016

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

The aim of the presented study is to assess the impacts of climate change on hydropower production of the Toce Alpine river basin in Italy. For the meteorological forcing of future scenarios, time series were generated by applying a quantile-based error-correction approach to downscale simulations from two regional climate models to point scale. Beside a general temperature increase, climate models simulate an increase of mean annual precipitation distributed over spring, autumn and winter, and a significant decrease in summer. A model of the hydropower system was driven by discharge time series for future scenarios, simulated with a spatially distributed hydrological model, with the simulation goal of defining the reservoirs management rule that maximizes the economic value of the hydropower production. The assessment of hydropower production for future climate till 2050 respect to current climate (2001–2010) showed an increase of production in autumn, winter and spring, and a reduction in June and July. Significant change in the reservoir management policy is expected due to anticipation of the date when the maximum volume of stored water has to be reached and an increase of the reservoir drawdown during August and September to prepare storage capacity for autumn inflows.

【 授权许可】

Unknown