ENAC Seminar Series by Dr. Rafael Schmitt
Event details
| Date | 20.12.2018 |
| Hour | 09:00 › 10:00 |
| Speaker | Dr. Rafael Schmitt |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
9:00 – 10:00 – Dr. Rafael Schmitt
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment and Natural Capital Project, Stanford University, USA
Network-scale modelling of sediment connectivity for minimizing conflicts between hydropower generation and dam impacts on river systems
Most domains of river biophysical functioning depend on connectivity, e.g., for water, species, and sediment, within the river network. Dams and reservoirs, while crucial for renewable energy generation and water management, greatly impact connectivity and create significant environmental externalities. With regard to sediment, impacts are mutual as sediment accumulation in reservoirs impedes dam operation while downstream rivers suffer from a reduction in sediment load. However, impacts of dams on network-scale sediment connectivity are rarely reflected in the current planning of hydropower and water infrastructures, which commonly proceeds project-by-project and is rarely backed by strategic trade-off analyses between dam benefits and their network-scale impacts.
In this talk, I present progress towards making strategic planning of dams more operational. This research is enabled by CASCADE, a graph-based model for sediment connectivity and dam sediment trapping. CASCADE was designed to leverage scarce field data and remote sensing information into quantitative information on sediment connectivity in large rivers. CASCADE’s numerical efficiency allows coupling with tools for operations research and decision analysis, such as genetic algorithms, which are not commonly applied in neither sediment modeling nor hydropower planning. This talk will focus on the Mekong, a basin where rapid project-by-project construction of dams, driven by the riparian countries need for energy, is in strong conflict with ecosystem services supported by natural sediment connectivity. In this contested setting, our results demonstrate how connectivity modeling and strategic optimization of dam portfolios could greatly reduce conflicts between dam impacts and hydropower generation in the basin and could be instrumental to identify basin-wide limits for lower-impact hydropower development in the context of optimizing future renewable energy portfolios.
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment and Natural Capital Project, Stanford University, USA
Network-scale modelling of sediment connectivity for minimizing conflicts between hydropower generation and dam impacts on river systems
Most domains of river biophysical functioning depend on connectivity, e.g., for water, species, and sediment, within the river network. Dams and reservoirs, while crucial for renewable energy generation and water management, greatly impact connectivity and create significant environmental externalities. With regard to sediment, impacts are mutual as sediment accumulation in reservoirs impedes dam operation while downstream rivers suffer from a reduction in sediment load. However, impacts of dams on network-scale sediment connectivity are rarely reflected in the current planning of hydropower and water infrastructures, which commonly proceeds project-by-project and is rarely backed by strategic trade-off analyses between dam benefits and their network-scale impacts.
In this talk, I present progress towards making strategic planning of dams more operational. This research is enabled by CASCADE, a graph-based model for sediment connectivity and dam sediment trapping. CASCADE was designed to leverage scarce field data and remote sensing information into quantitative information on sediment connectivity in large rivers. CASCADE’s numerical efficiency allows coupling with tools for operations research and decision analysis, such as genetic algorithms, which are not commonly applied in neither sediment modeling nor hydropower planning. This talk will focus on the Mekong, a basin where rapid project-by-project construction of dams, driven by the riparian countries need for energy, is in strong conflict with ecosystem services supported by natural sediment connectivity. In this contested setting, our results demonstrate how connectivity modeling and strategic optimization of dam portfolios could greatly reduce conflicts between dam impacts and hydropower generation in the basin and could be instrumental to identify basin-wide limits for lower-impact hydropower development in the context of optimizing future renewable energy portfolios.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Organizer
- ENAC
Contact
- Cristina Perez