SUSTAINABILITY PARAMETRIC STUDY ON HYDROPOWER PROJECTS

Abstract

Sustainability development has become a worldwide concern in the Hydropower sector, due to the adverse impacts faced by the projects, both environmentally and socially. The current practices does not cover the aspects in total to label a project as sustainable. Sustainability is checked from the Early planning stage to Operational stage, leading to more positive perspective towards Hydropower generation. This work explore the systemic limitations of environmental assessment for hydropower development and to study and analyse the affect the sustainability parameters provided by international standards on hydropower projects of Tehri and Koteshwar at Uttarakhand and, hydropower projects of Baglihar, Uri-I, Lower Jhelum, Salal, Dul Hasti, Sewa at Jammu and Kashmir; with the analysis focusing on four pillars of sustainability i.e. Social, Financial, Environmental and Technical, during Operational stage. Both, quantitative and qualitative analysis has been carried out according to the weightage given to the parameters as per the cases. Normalized values of parameters have been used for analysis, so that calculation is done easily for parameters with different SI units. The sustainability index of projects is measured on the scale of 0 to 1, in which 0.5 is taken as the benchmark point, scoring above is considered as sustainable and vice-versa. The study illustrates that the sustainability index ranges from 0.4 to 0.7. Results shows that hydropower projects of Tehri, Koteshwar, Baglihar, Salal, Dul Hasti have sustainability index greater than 0.5, indicating sustainable practices undergoing, whereas hydropower projects of Lower Jhelum, Uri-I, Sewa have sustainability index less than 0.5, indicating unsustainable practices. This report provides a set of comparison between the current EIA practices and sustainability index to understand how improvements could be made in future supported with the present scenario of the selected hydropower projects, with their strength, weakness and mitigations, besides literature reviews and report analysis in order to understand the extent of islanding data collection technique and contemporary challenges to be addressed with further researches