Considering precipitation forecasts for real-time decision-making in hydropower operations

This paper presents a new decision-making strategy for hydropower operations to handle uncertainty of forecasting precipitation. This strategy takes into account three basic components: uncertainty of precipitation, operation policies and a risk-evaluation model. In real-time operation, precipitations with different probabilities at different forecasting levels are obtained, and these precipitations are applied to forecast inflows using a hydrological forecasting model. Based on the forecasting inflows, the operation policies and risks with different probabilities are obtained. This study implements China’s Huanren reservoir and medium-term precipitation forecasts from the Global Forecast System to study the efficiency and stability of this strategy.