POTENTIAL ASSESSMENT FOR SHP DEVELOPMENT IN UTTARANCHAL USING IMP SOFTWARE

Abstract

Potential assessment plays a key role for small hydropower (SHP) development. There is a huge untapped hydropower potential in India. Uttaranchal is one of the important states in terms of Small Hydropower potential. To tap the enormous available hydropower potential in Uttaranchal state, software Integrated Method for Power Analysis (IMP) 5.0 is used for potential assessment of SHP sites. IMP software is an user friendly tool _ of potential assessment for SHP development on ungauged sites. In this software relevant meteorological and topographic data is used to determine the flow characteristics of the sites. The daily temperature data, rainfall data and the watershed data are used and by the software daily stream flow is simulated for a gauged site. Then this simulated flow is compared with the observed flow of the same site by overlapping the hydrographs. Flow duration curves for both the discharges (observed and simulated) are drawn to compare the flows. The water budget and time constants parameters were adjusted till the simulated flow matches with the observed flow. The parameters were fixed up and used along with the watershed data and meteorological data to simulate the flow of ungauged sites. Using the simulated data, flow duration curves for the SHP potential sites are drawn to compute the power potential.