INCORPORATION OF NON-POWER REQUIREMENTS IN THE BC HYDRO COLUMBIA RIVER TREATY OPTIMIZATION MODEL

摘要

Non-power requirements to support fisheries and recreational demands downstream of reservoirs in the Columbia River in Canada and the U.S. were incorporated to facilitate long-term operation of Canadian reservoirs (Mica and Arrow) using the Goal Programming technique. The Columbia River Treaty between Canada and the U.S.A. requires preparing Annual Operating Plan (AOP) which only includes power generation and flood protection but excludes any recreational and fisheries obligations. However, Supplemental Operating Agreements (SOA) have been negotiated and implemented since 1990s to satisfy recreational and fisheries requirements in the Columbia River. The existing Columbia River Treaty model, developed by the University of British Columbia (UBC) and BC Hydro Research Team, considers Flood Control Rule Curve as a limiting factor and uses power generation as the sole objective. In this study, three non-power requirements were included into the optimization process, converting the existing model into a multi-objective optimization model. In order to satisfy power generation requirement in the U.S., downstream of Arrow Dam (ARD) in Canada, a certain flow release in January needs to be determined. Therefore, the satisfaction of the non-power requirements is sensitive to the flow requirement below ARD. A number of scenarios were studied to assess the impact of different January flow requirements at ARD on the satisfaction of the non-power requirements. To incorporate the non-power requirements, a multi-objective optimization model was developed using a state-of-art technique, named Goal Programming (GP). GP as a robust multi-objective optimization method has not been used extensively in the reservoir optimization. The optimization results showed that lowering the minimum January flow at ARD increases the degree of satisfaction of non-power requirements. However, this may be in conflict with the power requirement for the Pacific North-west winter peak loads.