WPTO Releases Hydropower Market Report and Hydropower Value Study
This week, WPTO has released two highly anticipated reports—the U.S. Hydropower Market Report and the Hydropower Value Study (HVS): Current Status and Future Opportunities—that will help provide the hydropower community with valuable insight into hydropower industry trends and future directions. We anticipate that information in these reports will provide owner/operators, planners, regulators, manufacturers, and environmental organizations with both foundational data and illustrations of the value of hydropower that can further their missions. Moreover, these reports can inform the broader power system community—including the solar, wind, and battery storage industries—about the evolving role of hydropower as an integrator of variable renewables.
Hydropower Market Report
The January 2021 edition of the U.S. Hydropower Market Report compiles data from public and commercial sources as well as research findings from other Department of Energy research and development projects to provide a comprehensive picture of developments in the U.S. hydropower and pumped-storage fleet and industry trends for U.S. and global hydropower.
The report highlights developments from 2017–2019 and contextualizes this information compared to evolving high-level trends over the past 10–20 years. Apart from presenting trends over time, the report discusses differences in those trends by region, plant size, owner type, or other attributes.
|
Hydropower Value Study
The Hydropower Value Study (HVS): Current Status and Future Opportunities explores current hydropower operations and resulting value in examples across the country. HVS shows that hydropower operations are changing in some regions, but hydropower continues to be a strong contributor to grid reliability and resilience. Hydropower also varies significantly across the country in terms of its technical capabilities and the purposes and roles it must fulfill. And while declining energy prices may challenge traditional value propositions for hydropower, new compensation mechanisms are emerging that better account for flexibility and other values hydropower provides.
Since the inception of HVS, WPTO formally launched the HydroWIRES Initiative, designed to understand, enable, and improve hydropower and PSH’s contributions to reliability, resilience, and integration in a rapidly evolving electricity system.
|
|
