SHARE
Project

Testing of Hydropower Technology

Topic:
Melton Hill Hydropower Dam

Overview/Objective           

For over 100 years, hydropower has provided an efficient and sustainable source of renewable energy. Future developments will come mostly from small hydropower facilities – those generating between 10 and 30 megawatts of electricity – and it will play a crucial role in complementing other more variable and intermittent resources (e.g., solar and wind) by providing flexible and dispatchable generation and energy storage.

Recent changes in the global energy sector have prompted the need for technological innovations to address performance, reliability, safety, and environmental standards. While larger hydropower plants have well-established designs and validation processes, small hydropower facility owners must often weigh the cost of testing new technology with potential revenue.

Tasked by the Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO), researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have released a new report that identifies the key hydropower testing gaps and recommends two initiatives to improve and expand on existing testing capabilities in the United States aimed at filling those gaps.

Results

ORNL categorized testing according to physical design hierarchy, design objectives, and test factors. This framework was applied to existing capabilities at national laboratories, universities, private testing centers, and federal agencies.

Information on testing needs and existing capabilities was captured through web searches and a public request for information that received responses from 19 stakeholder groups. Most of these capabilities can already cover several hydropower testing categories, including model-scale, flow-through testing of powertrains and conveyances for efficiency and reliability. However, few or no locations have testing technologies at full scale for high–technology readiness level innovations that involve high hydraulic capacity.

Flowchart

Key testing gaps:

  • access to full-scale testing
  • validation of environmental mitigation technology and a coordinated effort with local communities
  • testing for flexible operations over extended durations to ensure hydropower’s value in the evolving, national electrical grid
  • testing and validation of newly manufactured and advanced materials to enable innovative designs

Recommended initiatives:

  • Hydropower Testing Network – The use of existing testing capabilities for early-stage innovations could be promoted by creating an online testing network platform and a grant funding model. The program could be modeled on successful industrial support mechanisms, such as the WPTO TEAMER (Testing and Expertise for Marine Energy) network for marine energy technology development.
  • Full-Scale Hydropower Testing Facility – New testing infrastructure could be developed to pursue design validation at full-scale, flow-through conditions and with capabilities to monitor transient and dynamic responses for sustained durations. The facilities should be able to support validation of environmental metrics and unconventional material and manufacturing techniques. Constructing facilities at an existing federal structure, such as at a non-powered dam or navigation lock, could reduce costs and save time.
Hydropower Themes

Impact

The establishment of a federally-supported network of well-coordinated hydropower testing activities, along with the development of a comprehensive full-scale testing facility, will ensure the systemic validation of innovative technologies, which would otherwise fail to approach the market. Technological validation is essential to unlock WPTO’s goals of widespread commercialization of innovations that can improve hydropower flexibility and energy storage, use of advanced manufacturing and materials, and environmental mitigations.

The initiatives will directly benefit hydropower facility owners and operators who do not possess risk-bearing capacity to adopt new untested technologies, and manufacturers who do not have the internal resources to test nascent technologies. The validation and consequent commercialization of these technologies will be key to promoting the hydropower growth in the United States.