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Assessing Climate Impacts on Hydropower Production of Toce Alpine Basin

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Engineering Geology for Society and Territory - Volume 1

Abstract

The aim of the presented study is to assess the impacts of climate change on hydropower production of the Toce alpine river basin, in Italy. A model of the hydropower system was driven by discharge time series at hourly scale with the simulation goal of defining the reservoirs management rule that maximize the economic value of the hydropower production. To this purpose, current energy price was assumed for the future. Assessment of hydropower production of future climate (2041–2050) respect to current climate (2001–2010) showed an increment of production in Autumn, Winter and Spring, and a reduction in June and July. Significant change in the reservoirs management policy is expected due to anticipation of the date when the maximum volume of stored water has to be reached and an increase of reservoir drawdown during August and September to prepare storage capacity for autumn inflows.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by ACQWA EU/FP7 project (grant number 212250) “Assessing Climate impacts on the Quantity and quality of WAter” [link:http://www.acqwa.ch]. We thank ARPA Piemonte for providing meteorological and discharge observations used to calibrate the hydrological model.

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Correspondence to Giovanni Ravazzani .

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Ravazzani, G., Dalla Valle, F., Mendlik, T., Galeati, G., Gobiet, A., Mancini, M. (2015). Assessing Climate Impacts on Hydropower Production of Toce Alpine Basin. In: Lollino, G., Manconi, A., Clague, J., Shan, W., Chiarle, M. (eds) Engineering Geology for Society and Territory - Volume 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09300-0_2

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