HydroBoost: Increasing hydropower revenue with realistic forecasting

In many electricity markets, hydropower operators earn a significant portion of their revenue from the day-ahead market. In this market, utilities buy electricity based on expected demand for the next day, while power producers offer to sell electricity at prices based on forecasted production and demand. This process ensures that enough electricity is available to meet demand and helps stabilize prices by balancing supply and demand ahead of time.

However, optimizing the revenue and power storage capabilities of hydropower plants is challenging because water flow varies with seasons and weather conditions. Current tools, designed to provide revenue forecasts based on potential power output, are often unrealistically optimistic. The result is that these tools don’t provide sufficient information for operators to make informed decisions about selling power in the day-ahead market.

To help hydropower operators, researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office, developed HydroBoost, an optimization solver. An optimization solver is software that finds the best solution to a given mathematical problem. In this case, the software maximizes revenue by helping operators plan when to use their hybrid hydro and battery resources based on predicted energy prices.

HydroBoost offers more realistic forecasts so hydropower owners can make better decisions about hybrid hydropower and battery storage systems.

“We did a study for Pacific Gas & Electric where we looked at a hydropower plant to see if it was economically viable for them to include a battery,” said Hill Balliet, a technical relationships and program development manager at INL. “We got to the end and gave them the results; the analysis said they should build the battery, but the tool we used was overly optimistic about the profits they’d make and assumed they had perfect information about future trends. That unrealistic optimism left too much uncertainty, and they decided not to add batteries to the hydropower plant. That was a big part of the motivation to build HydroBoost. We wanted to build a more realistic and useful tool that was based on how operators actually think and work.”

Although INL led the project, both laboratories offered experience and expertise to create the tool.

“Operators are missing out on opportunities to improve energy security,” said Balliet. “Batteries, if viable, would decrease prices and improve the reliability of the systems. We saw a gap that needed to be filled and worked with ANL to get it done.”

HydroBoost

HydroBoost is the first tool to incorporate seven-day forecasting in its optimization process, making it more useful in real-life scenarios such as setting the most realistically profitable suggestions for the day-ahead market. Designed to mirror how operators make decisions, HydroBoost offers a more realistic approach to energy optimization, helping operators make informed decisions that align with probable conditions. Both run-of-river and reservoir storage sites can use the tool. Although support for cascaded sites or pumped storage plants is not available, these features will be added in upgrades:

The upgrades will also include features to analyze:

• Battery size and its charge capacity
• Efficiency of the battery’s charge and discharge cycles
• Maximum rate at which the battery can be charged
• Limits on additional services the battery can provide
• Costs associated with battery usage
• Hourly energy prices and prices for additional services
• Limits on how much power can be connected to the grid
• Financial costs
• Volume of water in the hydro reservoir and seasonal planning
• Hourly water inflows and diversions
• Power capacity of hydro units and costs for starting and stopping them

HydroBoost was designed to aid consultants, owners, utility experts, modeling experts, hydro operators and long-term planners. Researchers developed the tool to meet the rigorous standards of investors, banks and technical experts, ensuring accuracy and reliability.

“HydroBoost’s biggest advantage is its versatility in evaluating different types of planning and decision-making approaches,” said Matt Mahalik, a principal software developer at ANL who was on the team that developed HydroBoost. “Traditional optimization tools aren’t practical for developing realistic expectations for investment.”

HydroBoost is a powerful tool for hybrid hydropower and battery storage operators, helping them optimize revenue, adapt to variable conditions and enhance system performance. Hybridizing hydropower with battery storage will benefit the industry for years, cutting costs and adapting to new research and advancements in the field.

“HydroBoost can model true-to-life planning approaches with different horizons and uncertainties, mimicking real-world outcomes expected from human schedulers,” Mahalik said. “It provides evaluations of all these approaches with minimal user effort, offering the benefits of multiple models in one.”