Abstract
Climate change impacts on watersheds can potentially exacerbate water scarcity issues where water serves multiple purposes including hydropower. The long-term management of water and energy resources is still mostly approached in a siloed manner at different basins or watersheds, failing to consider the potential impacts that may concurrently affect many regions at once. There is a need for a large-scale hydropower modeling framework that can examine climate impacts across adjoining river basins and balancing authorities (BAs) and provide a periodic assessment at regional to national scales. Expanding from our prior assessment only for the United States (US) federal hydropower plants, we enhance and extend two regional hydropower models to cover over 85% of the total hydropower nameplate capacity and present the first contiguous US-wide assessment of future hydropower production under Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6’s high-end Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 5-8.5 emission scenario using an uncertainty-aware multi-model ensemble approach. We present regional hydropower projections, using both BA regions and US Hydrologic Subregions (HUC4s), to consistently inform the energy and water communities for two future periods—the near-term (2020-2039) and the mid-term (2040-2059) relative to a historical baseline period (1980-2019). We find that the median projected changes in annual hydropower generation are typically positive—approximately 5% in the near-term, and 10% in the mid-term. However, since the risk of regional droughts is also projected to increase, future planning cannot overly rely on the ensemble median, as the potential of severe hydropower reductions could be overlooked. The assessment offers an ensemble of future hydropower generation projections, providing regional utilities and power system operators with consistent data to develop drought scenarios, design long duration storage and evaluate energy infrastructure reliability under intensified inter-annual and seasonal variability.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 094057 |
| Journal | Environmental Research Letters |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue number | 9 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Sep 1 2024 |
Funding
This study was supported by the US Department of Energy (DOE) Water Power Technologies Office as a part of the SECURE Water Act Section 9505 Assessment. This research leverages and enhances the capabilities of mosartwmpy, a Python version of the MOSART-WM model supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, as part of research in the MultiSector Dynamics, Earth, and Environmental Systems Modeling Program. The research used resources from the Pacific Northwest Research Computing at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), which are DOE Office of Science User Facilities. This paper was co-authored by employees of PNNL, managed by Battelle under contract DE-AC05-76RL01830, and ORNL, managed by UT Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US DOE. Accordingly, the US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript or allow others to do so, for US Government purposes.
Keywords
- CMIP6
- CONUS
- United States
- climate change
- climate projections
- hydropower production
- renewable energy