Hydropower is a key pillar of the energy supply in Austria, which generates around 60 per cent of its electricity from hydroelectric power plants. There are currently a few hundred large-scale hydropower plants and thousands of smaller ones in operation, some of which have been running for over 40 years now. Being very investment-intensive, hydroelectric power plants are planned and designed with very long operating lives in mind. The advanced age of many plants is one of the main reasons why digitalisation is only making slow progress in the hydropower sector. The DIGI-Hydro project is geared towards injecting new momentum into research on digitalisation in hydropower and thus laying the foundations for developing new concepts for operating hydropower plants digitally and assessing their condition automatically.

Securing future supplies        

The energy transition is bringing about major changes in the electricity market and posing new challenges to the operation of power plants. Increased electricity generation from renewable sources is causing greater fluctuation in the power grid. These have to be balanced out in order to guarantee security of supply. Hydropower plants were originally designed for a constant energy supply, i.e. for working in an efficient mode in which the wear and tear of machine parts is kept to a minimum. If more use is made of such plants to regulate the grid in the future, they will invariably be run more often in far-from-ideal operating conditions for which they were neither designed nor built. The impact of these new operating conditions on operation and the expected life of the plants has thus become a key topic for research.

Digitalisation in the hydropower sector

In the DIGI-Hydro project, an interdisciplinary team led by the Institute for Energy Systems and Thermodynamics at TU Wien¹ is working on formulating a digitalisation strategy for hydroelectric power plants to enable data-driven predictions of the lifespan of water turbines, i.e. the mechanical parts of the plant. Their work is divided into the following packages:
> A concept for monitoring hydropower plants using sensors
What kind of sensors are suitable for assessing the condition of hydropower plants automatically is not known at present, and further it is to be investigated how detailed the data needs to be or what sort of data volumes are to be expected.
> New methods for storing and analysing data
The measurements being planned are likely to generate a great deal of data, which poses questions about how to store it efficiently and analyse it further down the line.
> A platform for automatic condition assessment
The project is using findings from extensive measurements and data analyses to develop models for assessing the condition of hydropower plants in an automated and data-driven way.

Measurement setup and installation of sensors

A key part of DIGI-Hydro concerns installing measuring sensors in operational hydropower plants. Following laboratory tests at TU Wien, the first sensor measurements have now begun on an active plant in Austria. The ongoing measurements will supply data on the plant’s operation continuously over a six-month period. At the same time, data storage methods and analytical algorithms are being trialled so that the large volumes of data can be analysed.

New insights

Automated condition assessment, combined with data-based access to remote monitoring, is opening up a new avenue towards giving hydropower plants digital twins. The DIGI-Hydro project is enabling the devlopment of a strategy for collecting and analysing real-time data on hydropower plants, a major step towards making hydropower digital.
 
www.digi-hydro.com
 
¹ PROJECT PARTNERS: Institute for Energy Systems and Thermodynamics at TU Wien (project management), VRVis Zentrum für Virtual Reality und Visualisierung Forschungs-GmbH, HAKOM Time Series GmbH and VibroConcept GmbH.