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At this year’s Clean Currents conference in Portland, OR CADSWES industry expert Tim Magee delivered a compelling presentation titled “System-Level Hydropower Flexibility” on October 9. Magee’s talk explored the critical role of hydropower flexibility within a growing and increasingly diverse energy grid. His presentation introduced innovative "flexibility charts" and metrics designed to assess hydropower systems at scale, a breakthrough approach that promises to reshape visual and numerical evaluations of flexibility across different reservoirs and systems. Clean Currents 2024, held from October 7–10, remains the leading event for the waterpower industry, bringing together insights and advancements that address pressing challenges in sustainable energy.

For more details, visit Clean Currents:

Abstract
The inherent flexibility of hydropower units is known to be valuable for both power producers and the larger power grid because many other power sources are less flexible, and some sources are not dispatchable. These limitations of other power sources and their growing use means that fully taking advantage of hydropower flexibility is more important than ever.
Our work with operational models that cover 1/3 of the U.S. hydropower fleet and our prior flexibility research informs our opinion that the flexibility of individual units often does not translate to system level flexibility because of other constraints at the plant and system level, often reflecting the multi-purpose use of reservoirs, mismatched hydropower plant sizes, lag times between reservoirs, and many other factors. From a power perspective, there is an important and open need to assess actual system level flexibility both visually and numerically.
We present new “flexibility charts” to visualize system-level hydropower flexibility and flexibility metrics derived from these charts. These charts and metrics provide a basis to make a variety of visual and numerical comparisons: different reservoirs, different systems, different policies, different conditions, etc. The flexibility charts generalize the concept of the average utilization factor for a hydropower plant over a period of time to a system of reservoirs, We motivate and illustrate flexibility charts with multiple plant examples. We also differentiate between theoretical, optimal, and observed flexibility charts and metrics.
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