Management strategies for hydropower plants a simple dynamic programming approach

TL;DR

This paper presents a simple dynamic programming method for managing hydropower plants, achieving near-optimal performance with low computational effort and comparing favorably to more complex PDE-based methods.

Contribution

The authors develop a straightforward dynamic programming approach for hydropower management that estimates unknown variables from data, offering an efficient alternative to complex PDE-based methods.

Findings

Achieves 97.1% of the theoretical maximum performance.

Performs well on both dam and Run-of-River hydropower plants.

Outperforms more complex PDE-based methods when data is rich.

Abstract

We use a dynamic programming approach to construct management strategies for a hydropower plant with a dam and a continuously adjustable unit. Along the way, we estimate unknown variables via simple models using historical data and forecasts. Our suggested scheme achieves on average 97.1 % of the theoretical maximum using small computational effort. We also apply our scheme to a Run-of-River hydropower plant and compare the strategies and results to the much more involved PDE-based optimal switching method studied earlier by the authors in (Optimization and Engineering (2021): 1-25); this comparison shows that our simple approach may be preferable if the underlying data is sufficiently rich.