Abstract
The U. S. Department of Energy’s Hydropower Advancement Project (HAP) was
initiated to characterize and trend hydropower asset conditions across the
U.S.A.’s existing hydropower fleet and to identify and evaluate the upgrading
opportunities. Although HAP includes both detailed performance assessments
and condition assessments of existing hydropower plants, this paper focuses on
the performance assessments.
Plant performance assessments provide a set of statistics and indices that
characterize the historical extent to which each plant has converted the potential
energy at a site into electrical energy for the power system. The performance
metrics enable benchmarking and trending of performance across many projects
in a variety contexts (e.g., river systems, power systems, and water availability).
During FY2011 and FY2012, assessments will be performed on ten plants, with
an additional fifty plants scheduled for FY2013. This paper focuses on the
performance assessments completed to date, details the performance assessment
process, and describes results from the performance assessments.