Off-stream Hydropower Plant Planning in an Integrated Water Resources Assessment Framework, Case Study: Aras Hydropower Project

Hydro-power plant planning is one of the typical water planning problems, however with recent changes in water planning approaches the procedure should be performed within an integrated water planning framework incorporating all necessary aspects including hydrology, water demands, environmental requirements and so on. This study takes such an approach in planning a couple of off-stream power plants on ArasRiver including Megri located in Armenia and GharehChilar located in Iran. The study also has some contributions from modeling viewpoint; it develops capabilities of hydro-energy simulation for an integrated water planning and assessment tools, viz WEAP model. The contribution is in implementing one of the well-known procedures for hydropower simulation called Sequential Streamflow Routing (SSR

Keywords:

1- off-stream power plants , 2- integrated water resources management , 3- WEAP model , 4- sequential streamflow routing , 5- Aras River