HYDROLOGICAL INVESTIGATION AND ANALYSIS FOR HYDRO POWER PROJECTS

Abstract

There is considerable untapped hydroelectric potential around the world, especially in developing countries. With negligible greenhouse gas emissions, hydroelectric power offers an attractive solution to address global climate change.Planning plays important role in the growth and development of hydropower. It is quite obvious that most of the potential sites for hydro-power projects are likely to be ungauged. For such potential sites, there are either insignificant data or no flow data available for any type of hydrological analysis. In the present study the data of gauged catchments of the upper Narmada basin has been used to find out the discharge of ungauged sites of the corresponding catchments. Data from five river gauging stations has first been taken to find out the flow in the upstream ungauged tributaries of these gauged catchments. Water availability with time variability at the proposed project site is essential to estimate the power potential and annual energy generation. The Flow Duration Curve (FDC) is a simple depiction of water availability with time variability. It shows a discharge which has equaled or exceeded certain percentage of time out of the total time period which is generally taken as one year. The FDC at the ungauged site has been developed using the regionalization of the parameters of chosen probability distribution for the gauged sites.