IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting - IEEE PES GM 2010, Minneapolis (United States of America). 25-29 July 2010
Summary:
The storage capacity (or “regularization capacity”) of a hydro system refers essentially to its capability of transferring excess inflow energy from wet to dry seasons. The Brazilian hydro power system is formed by hundreds of reservoirs capable of multi-year storage capacity. Historically, this has been measured in the Brazilian Power System in terms of the duration of the critical period, which in turn is obtained from optimization models that calculate the firm energy (FE) of hydroelectric systems. These models, however, only represent the hydroelectric system explicitly and do not take into account the synergy between hydro and thermal plants. This synergy can be an important aspect in defining the storage capacity of the hydrothermal system. The objective of this article is: (i) to define a methodology for measuring the regularization capacity of a generation system; (ii) to analyze by this measure the current regularization capacity of the Brazilian system; and (iii) to analyze the impact of the development of large-scale run-of-the-river hydro plants that are in the pipeline to start commissioning in the next years.
Keywords: Regulation capacity, firm energy, environmental constraint, hydrothermal operation.
DOI: 
https://doi.org/10.1109/PES.2010.5589738
Published in IEEE PES GM 2010, pp: 1-7, ISBN: 978-1-4244-6549-1
Publication date: 2010-07-25.
Citation:
B. Bezerra, L.A. Barroso, M. Brito, F. Porrua, B. Flach, M. V. Pereira, Measuring the hydroelectric regularization capacity of the Brazilian hydrothermal system, IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting - IEEE PES GM 2010, Minneapolis (United States of America). 25-29 July 2010. In: IEEE PES GM 2010: Conference proceedings, ISBN: 978-1-4244-6549-1
