Comparison of Different Computational Methods and Formulations for Hydropower Equivalents

Simplified models of hydropower systems are necessary for simulation of large power systems, long-term analysis, and future studies. One common simplification has been to aggregate all hydropower within an area based on historical data. Another option is to use mathematical so-caned hydropower Equivalents. Here, hydropower Equivalents represent an optimized model reduction of a more Detailed model depicting the complete hydropower system within a specific area. These Equivalents are computed based on a bilevel optimization problem formulation. In this paper, the impact different Equivalent model constraints have on the performance is analyzed via a novel investigation of new model formulations. Moreover, recent solution methods and a baseline aggregation of the hydropower from statistics are compared and evaluated for the first time. All bilevel Equivalents show a significantly better performance than the baseline aggregation; the accuracy in hourly power generation relative to the Detailed model is almost twice as high for all bilevel Eqmvalents.