COST OPTIMIZATION OF LOW HEAD RUN-OF-RIVER SCHEME OF SMALL HYDRO POWER PLANTS

Abstract

Hydropower is one of the most economical, non-polluting and environment friendly resources. The other advantages of hydro power plant are low generation cost, long life, and high efficiency but at the same time it has the challenge of high initial investment cost as compared to other generation technologies. The huge potential of small hydro power installation is available for development of run of river scheme in India. So the cost analysis of small hydro power plant comes into picture. The initial investment cost of small hydro power plant depends upon the many variables like site condition, available head, designed discharge, capacity etc. The present dissertation work presents the optimization of initial investment cost of low head Run of River small hydro power plant using a new hybrid optimization i.e. Particle swarm and gravitational search algorithm based optimization (PSOGSA). The cost equations are developed by RETScreen formula based costing method. There are four sites chosen for cost optimization using PSOGSA approach. The optimum head and optimum discharge is determined and corresponding net present value of chosen site has calculated in this present work. When this PSOGSA based result is compared with the improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) based result, it has been found that the particle swarm and gravitational search algorithm based optimization (PSOGSA) gives the better results than IPSO.