OUR SERVICES
Dam reservoir Management
Hydropower development in Africa is undergoing a surge, with parallel investments in windmills and solar plants. The uneven production of solar power can be buffered by extra or reduced water releases. Although the technology for this exists, it is not yet being applied in Africa due to a lack of appropriate information and monitoring systems. One step further would be “pumped storage” in which excess solar power collected during the day is used to pump water into a reservoir from where it can be released in times of shortage at night.
Reservoirs also provide household and irrigation water and can play a role in flood attenuation. The Reservoir Management service will provide reliable estimates of river inflows. The large areas draining into the reservoirs make short-term hydrological inflow forecasts based on upstream flow measurements and hydraulic routing robust, as the system will react relatively slowly to changes in inputs. Such optimizations are technically far from trivial but consortium partner TUD has been at the forefront of developing robust optimization algorithms for the Water-Energy-Food nexus for a long time.
The service is being piloted on the Black Volta (Ghana) and the Lunsemfwa (Zambia) rivers. The developed systems, which are modular in structure, will readily scale to other countries and river basins. This clear economic value can also be harvested as the business case is clear to the customer. This secures the long-term financial viability of this service and the underlying observation networks.
