Planning of Cascade Hydropower Stations with the Consideration of Long-Term Operations under Uncertainties

In the location-related planning of a hydropower system, the consideration of future operations under uncertainties can make the decisions sustainable and robust. Then, it is of great importance to develop an effective approach that deals with the long-term stochasticity due to the long-lasting effects of the location selections. Thus, we propose a multistage stochastic programming model to optimize the planning decisions of cascade hydropower stations and the long-term stochastic operations in an integrated way. The first stage (i.e., the planning stage) in the model deals with the location and capacity decisions of the hydropower stations, while the subsequent stages implement the scheduling decisions under each stagewise stochastic scenario. To address the curse of dimensionality caused by the long-term stochastic operations, we further propose a novel dimensionality reduction approach based on dual equilibrium to transform the multistage model into a tractable two-stage stochastic program. The applicability of our approach is validated by a case study based on a basin of Yangtze River, China, and corresponding sensitivity analysis.