The Role of Hydropower Simulation in Smart Energy Systems

Energy conversion and transmission consists of intermittent and dispatchable energy sources connected with end-users and distributed energy sources through an interconnected grid. Intermittent sources like solar, wind, and tidal power plants exhibit fluctuating power production that create an imbalance between generation and load. In this regard, renewable dispatchable sources like hydropower, geothermal, nuclear, and biomass based plants together with fossil fuel based plants play a significant role in balancing out the variability caused by intermittent sources. Smart energy systems maximize the use of intermittent sources while balancing generation and load with dispatchable sources. In this paper, an overview of smart energy systems is given, with main focus on renewable dispatchable sources. The need for model based analysis is emphasized, which leads to multiphysics problems. Multiphysics simulation languages and libraries are presented. Particular emphasis is put on the Modelica language and relevant libraries such as OpenHPL for hydropower modeling. A case study of the Trollheim Hydropower plant in Norway is presented. In addition, OpenHPL and the photovoltaic PVSystems library for solar power plants are combined to see how hydropower can be used as a dispatchable source for balancing out the variability caused by solar power plants in the interconnected grid of smart energy systems.