HYDROPOWER DEVELOPMENT UNDER UNCERTAINTIES AND OPERATIONAL PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT

Abstract

Hydropower development has declined in the past decades and largely remains unexploited in developing countries. Such a performance of the sector is due to a wide range of uncertainties faced by the project developers. Inadequate uncertainties identification and analysis by the developer during planning leads to underestimating project time and cost, ultimately resulting in time and cost overruns. For a successful hydropower project development, it is necessary to minimize such overruns. Hence, an uncertainties based rational time and cost assessment is needed. Such an assessment requires historical data, which is difficult to obtain, especially in a developing country like India. As a project’s complexity increases in terms of its scope of work and multitude of tasks, experts’ involvement in project planning becomes necessary. Further, hydropower development involves uncertainties, such as social and administrative, which are effectively described by qualitative expert opinion. Hence, this study has addressed the pertinent research question; how to perform a qualitative analysis concerning uncertainties based rational time and cost assessment for a successful hydropower project development? Accordingly, the present study has developed qualitative methodologies for analyzing uncertainties in different stages for hydropower development and provides a rational time and cost assessment. The methodologies are applied to a case study of 126 MW (3x42) Myntdu Leshka hydroelectric project (MLHEP), located in Meghalaya, a north-eastern Himalayan state. The project is a run-of-river (diversion) scheme. The project has faced uncertainties, which led to cost and time overruns during its development. MLHEP was fully commissioned by 2013. The first objective identifies uncertainties in different stages of hydropower development. The stages are pre-feasibility, feasibility, detailed project report preparation (DPR), and post-DPR concurrence. The uncertainties in these stages are classified under the following categories; financial, technical, environmental, social, administrative, natural, and man-made disasters.