ASME Columbia Basin Section: Hydropower’s Contribution to Grid Resilience

Description

Hydropower facilities can provide important contributions to grid resilience—or the grid’s ability to respond to and recover from high impact, low-probability events like hurricanes or cyberattacks. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office commissioned this study to create a framework to accurately assess hydropower’s contributions to grid resilience. This study outlines hydropower’s characteristics that enable grid resilience and identifies methods, tools, models, and data to analyze hydropower’s impact on resilience. The framework and accompanying toolkit can be used by system operators, regulators, and policy analysts to assess the role of hydropower under various extreme grid conditions. Insights from this report exemplify hydropower’s essential role in stabilizing the grid after sudden, large losses of energy generation and extreme weather impacts to net load. The report also highlights hydropower’s storage capabilities and flexibility as critical assets for ensuring grid reliability during extreme weather events. Dr. Abhishek Somani is currently a Senior Economist and Team Leader at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. His research interests include design and analysis of electric power markets, both in USA and internationally. Over the years Dr. Somani has developed tools, models, and methodologies for economic valuation of energy systems and technologies, such as batteries, based on prevailing regulatory, policy, and market conditions. Somani is also involved in the DOE’s HydroWIRES initiative, which is investigating role of hydropower in ensuring reliable and resilient operations of the power systems. Alison Colotelo is a Research Scientist with over 14 years of professional experience that includes basic and applied research in the effects of human development on the environment, as well as project management. Her work involves building and working with multi-disciplinary teams that tackle a diverse set of problems for the US Department of Energy (DOE) and Department of Defense (DOD). In addition to her technical work, she enjoys sharing her passion for science with the community through visits to local schools and participation in other scientific outreach activities. Agenda: • Greetings & Welcome • Speaker Introduction • Presentation • Q&A • Attendee Networking