An assessment on channel length impact on hydropower plant economy

currently, there is a worldwide increasing demand for energy sources with the emphasis on clean and renewable ones. In the meantime, hydropower plant has been introduced as clean energy sources with the lowest environmental impact. Hydropower plant performance is highly dependent on the topographical and hydrological characteristic of the site. In the way that hydropower plant capacity increases with exploitable head and discharge increase. In a hydropower plant with fixed weir, there is a need of prolonging channel length to increase exploitable head that it also eventuates to the more costly project. In this study, the impact of increasing channel length on hydropower plants economy was assessed. Economic indicators, which are net present value, benefit-cost ratio and internal rate of return in this study, were calculated for different distance between weir site and turbine house (from 500 meter to 7000 meter with the interval of 500 meter) for a specified hydropower plant in Nokhan area in Iran. It was demonstrated that prolonging channel length will not always enhance economic indicators of the project and there is an optimum channel length for hydropower plants that must be determined through economic analysis.

Keywords:

hydropower plant , economic analysis , channel length