Hydropower plants

Abstract

Hydropower generation has, especially in mountainous areas and in regions with high discharge like the Upper Danube basin, a large proportion of the total renewable energy production. Hydropower as energy supplier will be even more important in the future as predictions assume that the future energy demand will increase. Within the hydropower module of DANUBIA, it is distinct between run-of-the-river power plants mainly situated in rivers and river channels and storage power plants with reservoirs situated especially in regions with high drop heights. The reservoir of a storage power plant is managed by an operation plan mainly depending on hydrological variables. The analysed data includes all larger hydropower plants with a bottleneck capacity of at least 5 MW within the Upper Danube basin. This comprises 118 run-of-the-river power plants with mean annual outputs of 20 and 550 GWh amounting to 13.0 million MWh and 22 storage power plants with mean annual outputs between 25 and 1,000 GWh amounting to 5.7 MWh.