SBIR-STTR Award

Hydropower is now increasingly operated outside of original design conditions due to changing water availability and environmental induced operating parameters. Fifty percent of operational hydroelectric dams in the United States are 50 years or older and nearly all were designed to operate steadily as a primary base load resource. Compounding these issues is the increasing prevalence of intermittent power producers such as wind and solar. Because hydropower has a relatively stable supply of "fuel", it can more easily ramp up or down power production quickly as intermittent producers add to or disappear from the power grid. Increasingly, hydropower generators are forced to cycle on and off to accommodate power grid congestion and this cycling results in excessive wear and tear to hydropower mechanical and electrical components. Standard turbines and generators were designed to operate steadily as baseload suppliers with a narrow range of design operations (water head, flow rate, and turbine speed). Operating outside of these parameters in a traditional generator setup results in poor quality power (voltage and frequency). Therefore, traditional generators must halt power production when design operating conditions do not exist. Modern power electronics will alleviate these problems by providing an electronic, non-mechanical mechanism to match power production to various water head and flow conditions. This project will quantify the range of scalable power achievable across varying flow conditions made possible with power electronics and new generation permanent magnet generators. By modulating head and flow at a typical hydropower site, this project will test and demonstrate that power electronics can internally maintain quality power production even under variable flow and head conditions. This would likely decrease additional wear and tear to hydropower drivetrain equipment while adding the ability to maintain power export when a typical generator would be forced offline. Once demonstrated and refined, the processes collected from this research will be deployable to sixty percent of all hydropower sites in the United States allowing greater distributed power generation. Adding the ability to operate under variable conditions will also allow hydroelectric sites to meet environmental and ecological demands while sharing the power grid other power producers.

Climate change is predicted to have major impacts on hydropower operations as weather extremes become more common. Typical hydropower facilities were designed and built to provide base load power. Further, increased addition of intermittent generation sources to the power grid over the last 20 years, such as solar and wind power, has resulted in hydropower operations being required to cycle on and off to accommodate dynamic grid changes caused by these power sources. Changes in climate and weather are also forcing hydropower operation outside of original design head and flow. Our project will compare and assess the two prevailing different generator types while being controlled by our innovative four quadrant invert platform. If successful, our results will offer a path forward that will allow hydropower to remain in continuous operation even with dynamic grid and hydrologic changes. In addition to helping hydropower operation, scalable power generation benefits the riverine environment by decreasing shoreline erosion, allowing more natural and consistent flow, facilitating continuous nutrient and oxygen flow, and stabilizing water temperatures all while decreasing stop/start cycling which causes damage to hydropower equipment. During Phase 2 we will test different generator types to better understand what type of generator functions best under variable water elevation and flow conditions. Once we demonstrate that our technology functions well in variable speed and power operation it can be adapted to capture energy in other renewable applications and industries where motor braking or reciprocating motion occurs. Motion energy that was once wasted as heat energy during the braking can be recaptured and reused. Our research will provide definitive data to the hydropower industry that will allow engineers to design future hydropower applications that can run continuously even with dynamically changing power grid conditions. Further, our research and ultimately our product will allow both renewable and waste energy to be easily captured and reused.