Hydro Power Potential

[MajidKhan]

Hi I am a student and I want to Identify potential sites for Hydro Power as my study project. Anyone could help me how out how to start it. I have 30m DEM of the area of interest. And now the basics like stream Delineation, Flow accumulation. But I want to identify specific site along the streams with specified head. Any help in this regard will be really appreciated. Anyone have built model please share it with me at mk_swati@yahoo.com

Thanks

[MarkBoucher]

If you use Arc Hydro, you can "build a wall" (dam), fill the area behind it, and compare see how much fill there is behind it.

1. Take the rawdem and put a polyline at the potential dam sites.


2. Use the BuildWall function under the Terrain Processing>DEM Manipulation menu to build a wall using the polyllines: Call the walled dem "DamDEM".


3. Fill the sinks of DamDEM to make "DamFil"


4. Do raster math: DamFil - rawdem = ResFil

The ResFil raster will generally represent the reservoir(s) behind the wall dam(s). I did this with and without burning streams. I've attached a pdf of my results when doing this without burning streams.

When I did this with burning streams, the wall left a low spot where the stream goes. I believe the Build Walls simply adds to the rawdem the wall height input in the Build Walls dialogue. It does not make a level wall.

It could be possible to do this "manually" by entering your polylines give them an elevation and create a raster using the wall elevation values from the polylines. Then, you could do some raster manipulation to choose the highest value between the the rawdem and the walldem to make a damdem that has the dam height you want. To iterate this through some trial and error, I'd make a model using Model Builder so I could "automate" the process.

Your dam site selection criteria may help you narrow down the site location. Of course, the geologic criteria could rule out many areas. Possibly obtaining the soil survey maps that identify rock outcrops would be useful.

[MajidKhan]

Thanks for your nice feedback. actually I was looking for kind of algo to apply on the whole area rather than selecting a site and then apply this method. I just want to provide the DEM and precipitation data. Rest my application should do to find out the potential energy based on slope and amount of the water flowing down. It will give me the rough idea of the sites suitable for the hydro power projects. Then I can further refine it with the methodology you just mention here.

I am attaching a paper where the methodology is described but I am unable to figure it out in ArcGIS.