Vulnerability of hydropower installations to climate change: Preliminary study

Abstract

The climate trends observed worldwide over the past few decades appear to corroborate the concerns of the scientific community about the many threats posed by global warming. Future changes of the current climate are expected to occur on different scales all around the globe, hence modifying the environmental background on the basis of which technological installations have been designed and operated. This can potentially threat the safety of the installations as well as their. The development of suitable tools aiming to predict the impact of climate change on technological installations is then essential in the wider context of climate change mitigation. Hydropower installations play often a crucial role not only as a long-term renewable resource of energy but also for flood control and water supply in the case of droughts. All these aspects highlight the increasing importance of such installations as well as their growing vulnerability to natural hazards. It is hence essential to enlarge the current understanding of the interaction mechanisms between such installations and the changing surrounding environment in order to take adequate measures for climate change adaptation and ensure the future safety and productivity of hydropower production. The current study aims to provide a novel model for the evaluation of the impact of climate change on the safety of hydropower stations. The approach adopted allows to include in the model the uncertainty inevitably associated with the input variables and to propagate such uncertainty within the analysis. The model proposed is finally applied to a realistic case-study in order to highlight its potential and limitations.