Sizing a hydropower plant consists in specifying the main features of the plant that will determine its capacity to generate energy. These features are the minimum and the maximum reservoir storage volumes, the installed capacity, and the design and the rated turbine heads. This paper aims to develop an efficient, flexible and automatic approach to optimally determine the hydropower plant features mentioned above. The usual heuristic methods applied to search for the optimal features of a hydropower plant are replaced by an approach that combines Genetic Algorithms and simulation techniques. A new methodology is introduced to evaluate the economic benefits; the simulation model can use different operation policies for the reservoirs and different stream flow time series. Some initial results show the sensitivity of the benefits in relation to changes in the operation policies.
Hydroelectric systems; hydroelectric power plants; sizing; reservoir; installed capacity; turbines; optimization; simulation; genetic algorithms; cost-benefit analysis
