Author(s)

J. Lopes de Almeida

Abstract

Multipurpose hydropower plants play an important role in water resources management throughout the world. In many cases the water stored in the reservoir dam can be used for agricultural irrigation or for hydroelectricity production. From a planning point of view this conflicting, mutually exclusive, water use can be remedied by judicious water allocation. This can be computed by a decision model that maximizes global return from both electricity and agricultural production, as we showed in previous papers. However, the increasing importance of environmental constraints, especially CO2 emission targets, demands new approaches in order to incorporate these aspects in the decision model. This paper describes a mathematical model that computes optimum water allocation taking into account the returns from hydroelectricity and agricultural production and also the corresponding CO2 net fluxes, in order to achieve a sustainable multipurpose hydropower management. After formulation the problem is solved using nonlinear programming. Keywords: multipurpose hydropower reservoir management optimization, irrigation, CO2 net flux, nonlinear programming. 1 Introduction Reservoir dams are hydraulic structures used pretty well all over the world. Their multipurpose character, combined with the natural scarcity of water resources, often leads to complex water management problems. This problem can arise when multipurpose reservoirs are committed to the two main tasks of agricultural irrigation, by diverting upstream water, and electricity production. From a sustainable planning point of view, water sharing should be established, taking into account both the revenue from the production activities and the

Keywords

multipurpose hydropower reservoir management optimization, irrigation, CO2 net flux, nonlinear programming.