The main objective of ReHydro is to demonstrate how European hydropower can be refurbished and modernized to be fit for a leading role in the future power system respecting sustainability requirements and societal needs in a climate change context. A suite of monitoring and digital tools (performance, cavitation, machine health) implemented at demonstration sites, will improve hydropower efficiency. Innovative concepts like retrofitting by pumped hydro and hybridization will make hydropower fit for future markets.
ReHydro will also demonstrate how biodiversity can be improved with new fish-friendly turbines, re-establishment of environmental flows, monitored using new tools such as eDNA. Smarter use of water resources will also be implemented, so that more services can be delivered to the power markets, while multi-purpose use of the water resources for navigation and recreation can be expanded and the ability to mitigate flooding and draughts are strengthened.
Project Objectives
Improve the flexibility of the existing European hydropower fleet ensuring suitability for today and future power markets through
- implementing and demonstrating five digital solutions and three advanced control systems
- improving and ensuring environmental sustainability and conservation of biodiversity
- identifying European market needs in three different scenarios for future energy system development
- using refurbishment of hydropower plants to provide non-energy services to the society by reducing peak flood, improving drought management and biodiversity, reducing non-navigable days during extreme events and increasing the awareness of recreational interests
- making European hydropower industry ready for export by creating eight new market products
- providing an overview of the benefit of modernisation for industry and policymakers
ReHydro innovations will go beyond the state-of-the-art in:
- Solutions for reducing sediment erosion in turbines
- Digitalisation tools for reducing maintenance and downtime
- Hybridization with batteries for flexibility and environmental benefits
- Advanced control for variable speed pumped storage retrofitting
- Multi-market optimization tools
- Eel-friendly turbine design
- Using eDNA metabarcoding sampling for assessing environmental impacts
- New methods for life-cycle assessments (LCA) and biodiversity footprint
- Multicriteria decision support framework to assist in the choice of refurbishment solutions
For mor information see the project website.
This project has received funding from the European Union under Climate, Energy and Mobility, Grant agreement 101147310