~FREE & LIVE-STREAMED~

IAHR Young Professionals Webinar Series

The Hydropower Sector: Research, Policy and Sustainable Opportunities

Thursday, 4 May 2023 | 2 pm CEST

IAHR YP Webinar Series   Watch ON DEMAND!  Presentations  Highlights

Introduction

Hydropower is a major player in several EU directives and programmes such as the Water Framework Directive and the Renewable Energy Directive (REPowerEU). Therefore, it is currently at the centre of a great debate: it is a clean and renewable energy technology, and reservoirs can provide multiple benefits. However, it may also generate adverse effects on ecosystems. Hydropower should be part of the solution to climate change, as it provides low carbon electricity generation and its storage capacity helps integrate other renewable, yet intermittent, energy sources into the grid.

Sustainable hydropower needs to achieve a good balance between electricity generation, social benefits and impacts on the ecosystem and biodiversity. The achievement of such a trade-off has been the aim of several discussions, where stakeholders generally fight with “a priori” and “adamant” positions, without considering the hydropower sector as a multi-benefit and a multi-impact, sector.

The webinar will highlight the complexity of the hydropower sector, some future sustainable opportunities, impacts and benefits, comparisons with other renewable energy technologies, research needs and policy and engineering challenges. Specific tools to assess the sustainability of hydropower systems will be discussed, particularly the G-Res tool to evaluate greenhouse gas emissions from reservoirs and the Hydropower Sustainability Standard.

Programme

• Introduction to the new Young Professionals webinar series by Francisco Pinto, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Portugal

• The complexity and sustainability of the hydropower sector by Emanuele Quaranta, European Commission Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy

• The voice of sustainable hydropower by Debbie Gray, Climate Policy Manager, International Hydropower Association

• Discussion/Roundtable of questions. Moderated by Anton J. Schleiss, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, and Daniel Valero, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany

Speakers

Certificates of attendance will be issued upon request.

Members: Free 

Non members: 25 euro or 12 euro (depending on the income country level) which is equivalent to a membership fee so a one-year free membership fee will be included. 

To request your certificate please contact Carmen Sánchez at accounts@iahr.org

Related

• IAHR Young Professionals Webinar Series

• IAHR Technical Committee on Hydraulic Machinery and Systems

• IAHR Technical Commitee on Hydraulic Structures

• Meet IAHR experts on Hydropower

• 40th IAHR World Congress Special Session on Introducing the “WFE” Nexus to Central Asia Focusing on Sustainable Development of Small Hydropower

• 40th IAHR World Congress “Vienna Industry Stream Event” on Sustainable Hydropower | Thursday, 24 August

• Special issue of Hydrolink on Hydropower (issue 2, 2023) to be published in June