Modeling California's high‐elevation hydropower systems in energy units

This paper presents a novel approach for modeling high‐elevation hydropower systems. Conservation of energy and energy flows (rather than water volume or mass flows) is used as the basis for modeling more than 135 high‐elevation high‐head hydropower sites throughout California. The unusual energy basis for reservoir modeling allows for development of hydropower operations models for a large number of plants to estimate large‐scale system behavior without the expense and time needed to develop traditional streamflow and reservoir volume‐based models in absence of storage and release capacity, penstock head, and efficiency information. Potential applications of the developed Energy‐Based Hydropower Optimization Model (EBHOM) include examination of the effects of climate change and energy prices on system‐wide generation and hydropower revenues. An extensive comparison of the EBHOM with a traditional hydropower optimization model used in California produced similar results and indicated good reliability of EBHOM's predictions.