Overview/Objective
The US hydropower fleet, with an average machine age of 64 years, will require modernization to sustain and improve the value and reliability of the nation’s longest-serving renewable energy technology. To assist hydropower asset managers, owners, and other stakeholders in enhancing hydropower capabilities, the US Department of Energy Water Power Technologies Office directed Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to initiate a Digital Twin for Hydropower Systems – Open Platform Framework (DTHS-OPF) research effort as part of its long-term effort to support digital twin technology.
As the name implies, a digital twin is a virtual representation of a real-world system—in this case, a hydropower facility. Monitoring the actual facility and comparing it to its virtual model, or digital twin, enables robust control and optimization of the physical facility, and enables the virtual model to learn and evolve. Digital twin technology has also been used by other industries, including manufacturing, automotive, and electrical.
The open platform network must integrate data from legacy systems and devices and be interoperable with new sensors and equipment.
Results
For this project, the ORNL and PNNL DTHS team is developing a series of hydropower digital twin models with increasing complexity in an open platform framework for the development and use of digital twin technologies by the hydropower industry. The effort is focused on reference hydropower units to demonstrate the process and uses of digital twins and the advantages of deploying this technology for hydropower reliability and performance.
In the initial stages of this effort, the ORNL and PNNL DTHS project team did the following:
- Elicited, from hydropower stakeholders and in response to the request from the Water Power Technologies Office, the information needed to appropriately scope a DTHS-OPF
- Documented and published the value propositions and appropriate scope for DTHS-OPF using the elicited information from stakeholders
- Drafted, published, and is refining a specification and roadmap for a DTHS-OPF that fully addresses the industry input and value propositions thus determined.
Impact
Digitizing hydropower is expected to reduce operating costs, improve reliability, address increasing operational complexity, and provide greater grid resiliency as the use of renewables increases.
The DTHS-OPF research project is an early step within a long-term vision that includes development and widespread adoption of an extensible DTHS-OPF as a best practice and baseline digitalization technology for optimal design, operation, and management of hydropower assets to ensure and enhance reliability, performance, and value.