Section C: New business opportunities

Thursday, 14 September 2017, 14:30-15:00h/C02

Optimised Operation of Hydro Power Plants along the River Lech

Dr. Meagan Burke and C. Silvester, Uniper Technologies, UK; M. Donauer, Uniper Kraftwerke, Germany

In the German state of Bavaria, Uniper operates hydropower plants along the rivers Main, Donau, Isar and Lech with a total installed capacity of 1948 MW and a yearly power generation of approximately 5 TWh. The river Lech has 22 hydro power plants, with a large storage reservoir at the top of the river chain and varying smaller storage reservoirs at the other plants.

The aim of the project was to create a tool which will advise the plant operators in making a schedule by which to run the hydro power plants to maximise profits subject to a number of constraints. The plants operate in a market with an hourly varying price and the tool produces a day-ahead production plan to maximise the value from the traded market while taking into account portfolio constraints arising from agreed frequency reserve.

The use of the water is affected by a wide number of technical constraints. Reservoir limits must be kept within regulated bounds and flow limitations between reservoirs must be observed. There also contractual commitments to ensure flow to third parties that share the river system. Decisions are also linked across time periods as the water takes several hours to transit through the river once it is released from the top reservoir.

Additionally, use of the water is in uenced by a number of external stakeholders with different goals and considerations that create further constraints on the use of the water. These stakeholders include; environmental groups, ood protection management, tourism board and sheries.

Optimally utilising the water and assets along the river is challenging due to the need to consider all stakeholders and requires a complex optimisation modelling approach to deliver good solutions. The solution is implemented in FICOs XPRESS Optimisation Suite with an Excel workbook used to input current conditions and view the solution. The tool typically outputs a solution in several minutes and financially outperforms the existing approach. The schedule optimisation tool is now being tested using forward energy prices.