Webinar: Cataloguing National Hydropower Flexibility

Featured Speakers: Patrick O’Connor, Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Nathalie Voisin, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Patrick O’Connor is an Energy Analyst at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, managing and executing projects assessing the markets, policy, and economics of hydropower, energy storage, and the electric power sector more broadly. He holds a BA in Mathematics and Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Masters of Environmental Management from the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University.

Dr. Nathalie Voisin is staff water resources engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and holds a dual appointment as assistant professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington. She leads inter-disciplinary research projects focusing on coupling climate, hydrology and water resources management models with power system models including production cost and building energy demand models.  Her most recent projects led to a better understanding of drought and heat wave patterns that are most challenging for grid operations, quantified predictability of grid operations economics associated with climate phases, projections of hydropower that include the representation of environmental and power system regulation, a risk-based implementation of future water availability and climate-driven load disturbances into resources adequacy studies.

Moderator: Charlie Smith, ESIG Executive Director

Registration Cost: FREE

Webinar Abstract: Hydroelectric plants contribute significant flexibility to the system. Due to their scale and dispatchability, these resources have been instrumental in the effective integration of wind and solar resources. Yet hydropower plants are also among the oldest operating plants today. The fleet is diverse, with different types and scales of machines, impoundments and flow (fuel) as well as multiple competing uses and environmental requirements. How is the hydropower fleet operated under today’s increasing demands for flexibility, and what is its potential to provide further flexibility and capacity? How can we measure hydropower plant flexibility in a way that allows its full utilization? These activities are sponsored by the US Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office.