Resource information
The world is faced with considerable
risk and uncertainty about climate change. Particular
attention has been paid increasingly to hydropower
generation in recent years because it is renewable energy.
However, hydropower is among the most vulnerable industries
to changes in global and regional climate. This paper aims
to examine the possibility of applying a simple vector
autoregressive model to forecast future hydrological series
and evaluate the resulting impact on hydropower projects.
Three projects are considered - in India, Sri Lanka, and
Vietnam. The results are still tentative in terms of both
methodology and implications; but the analysis shows that
the calibrated dynamic forecasts of hydrological series are
much different from the conventional reference points in the
90 percent dependable year. The paper also finds that
hydrological discharges tend to increase with rainfall and
decrease with temperature. The rainy season would likely
have higher water levels, but in the lean season water
resources would become even more limited. The amount of
energy generated would be affected to a certain extent, but
the project viability may not change so much. Comparing the
three cases, it is suggested that having larger installed
capacity and some storage capacity might be useful to
accommodate future hydrological series and seasonality. A
broader assessment will be called for at the project
preparation stage.
