BENCHMARKING ANALYSIS OF SMALL HYDROPOWER PLANTS USING DEA

Abstract

Among all the hydropower plants, Small Hydropower Power Plants can be considered as the most efficient in terms of environmental impacts and economics. According to the Alternate Hydro Energy Centre (AHEC) of IIT Roorkee, India has a potential for power generation from small / micro hydel projects of 21135.37 MW from 7135 locations. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has taken several efforts to stimulate the planned expansion of SHPs and to improve the dependability and quality of the projects. Different physical and financial incentives have been utilised to attract investment in commercial SHP projects, in addition to assisting state governments in the development of minor hydro projects. In this study the relative efficiency, ranking and improvements of the efficiency by reducing the O&M cost of small hydropower plants of Uttarakhand is done using CRS and VRS DEA input-oriented methods. 20 SHPs of Uttarakhand are considered for the analysis, 5 of Alaknanda sub basin, 12 of Bhagirathi sub basin and 3 of Yamuna basin. Installed capacity (MW), NPV of Project Capital Cost in 2021 (Lakhs Rs.) and O&M cost for the year 2021 (Lakhs Rs. / MW) are taken as inputs and Annual generation (MU) is taken as output. After analysing the data, it was observed that out of the 20 SHPs 9 were efficient and 11 were inefficient by VRS input oriented method. To compare the results produced by DEA, Multi Dimensional Scaling (Classical Coplot and Robust Coplot) is also used to plot the multivariate data in 2-D for visual representation and rich interpretation using Statistics and Machine Learning toolbox in MATLAB.