Author(s): Santiago Aurelio Ochoa Garcia; Carlos Marcelo Matovelle Bustos; Nelson Federico Cordova Gonzales

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Keywords: Regulation volumes; Operation scenarios; Climate change scenarios

Abstract: One of the specific problems that revolves around the control and use of water is the management of the resource in regulated basins and the possible impacts that climate change may have. Addressing the problem of efficient use of large volumes of reservoir water has motivated countless studies and research on the management of water resources in regulated basins. Among the methodologies for the study of water basins, the numerical simulation of flows is presented as a powerful tool to characterize and obtain innovative results applied to a variety of domains and scenarios, which will provide technical criteria around distribution of the water resources. The study domain is on the Paute River basin, where around 30% of Ecuador's hydroelectric energy is generated with the Paute Integral project. Therefore, studying the possible risks and optimizing its operation is a fundamental task. In the present work, the computational tools HEC-HMS and HEC-ResSim have been applied to characterize and optimize the volume of the Mazar (410 Hm3) and Amaluza (120 Hm3) reservoirs, which are used by the Mazar hydroelectric generation plants (170 MW) and Molino (1100 MW), respectively. In addition, two operation scenarios have been proposed with climate models RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5, where the inflow flows have varied in quantity and temporal distribution, conditioning the operation of the reservoirs. The plants analyzed are built in a cascade, so it is interesting to analyze the operating levels of the Mazar reservoir as the main regulatory body in this hydroelectric complex. With the evaluation in HEC-ResSim of different operating scenarios, for the optimization of the regulation volumes of the Mazar and Amaluza reservoirs, it has been evidenced that the optimal performance of the series analyzed (between 2014 and 2015) has a level of operation of the Mazar reservoir that can be reduced to 2135 meters above sea level (250 Hm3) to be stored in the Amaluza reservoir and used by the Molino plant with greater hydroelectric production.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3850/IAHR-39WC2521711920221662

Year: 2022