December 10th, 2014, Wednesday, at 4:30 p.m. in room V2.12, Politecnico di Milano – Como Campus.

Improving hydropower reservoir operation by using snow-related information

Quentin Desreumaux PhD. Candidate, University of Sherbrooke, Canada

Abstract

The Rio Tinto Alcan company operates a large aluminum plant in Northern British Columbia, Canada. This location has been chosen because of the large hydropower capacity available. However, this system is quite challenging to manage due to its particular location. The hydrology mainly piloted by snow, the flood management or the fish preservation are just a part of the constraints the operators have to deal with. To help them, an optimization tool have been recently developed. After a complete overview of this real case problem, we will discuss the modeling of the problem. We will also focus on the inclusion of different hydrological information and on the effectiveness of the management policy provided by each of this exogenous variable. As a result, an information based on the snow cover leads to the best policies in a multi-objective framework

Short CV

Quentin Desreumaux is a PhD student at The University of Sherbrooke, Canada. His works focus mainly on the value of hydrological and climatic information on reservoir operations.