Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
In recent years, production from HPPs is compromised due to the effect of change in the climatic pattern. The hydrology of the river is affected which in turn has changed the performance efficiency of HPPs attached to that river.
Climate change or global warming is the expected outcome of increases in atmospheric concentrations of “greenhouse” gases resulting from human activities. Many greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide (CO2), occur naturally and keep the earth warm by trapping heat in the atmosphere. Changes in the quantity and timing of river runoff, together with increased reservoir evaporation will have a number of effects on the production of hydroelectric power by climate change. These include impacts upon system operation (Whittington & Gundry, 1998; Riebsame et al., 1996), financial effects (Whittington & Gundry, 1998) and impacts on other energy sectors (Whittington & Gundry, 1998; Arnell, 1996; Gleick, 1993).
In the present century rapid urbanization was observed in most of the countries. Many villages are transformed to cities and many cities were converted to metro cities which produced surging demand for power to satisfy the basic as well as special needs of the urban population. As a result along with the conventional power plants water based energy sources are also affected.
Urban water supplies are used in households, industry, and commercial areas, as well as for urban services such as city washing, combating fire, maintenance of recreational lakes and swimming pools and irrigation of recreational areas. Urbanization impacts on HPPs are financial effects (Wang, Qiu & Kuang, 2009; Wang, Fang, Guan, Pang & Ma, 2014), electricity supply (Wang, Qiu & Kuang, 2009) and environmental (Chaisomphpb & Tanutpongpalin, 2004).
Another problem that effect the power production from HPP is the failure of machines employed to assist in power production. The turbine, generator, transformers, pipe lines, switch gears each of the element which are utilized to help in the power production can fail due to various regions like electrical or mechanical stress, over load, lifetime etc.
Machine is the most important for technological development of HPP. Technology - Control System depends on machine of HPP. Machine failure impact on Hydropower Plant (HPP) is financial effects (Shindor & Svirina, 2015).
The impact of climate change, urbanization and machine failure has reduced the performance efficiency of HPPs in many places of the World.
The assessment and prediction of hydropower unit’s performance degradation is an important part of the research for the sake of the unit’s safe and stable operation. Accurate prediction of performance degradation is the basis for drawing up the unit’s maintenance plan. High-accuracy prediction can ensure hydropower units run in more reasonably safe and stable condition. The forecast precision has a direct impact on the HPP economic benefit; therefore, it is necessary to carry out the performance degradation assessment and prediction to do a lot of research works so as to better ensure the reliability of hydropower units’ operation (An, Pan, Zhang & TANG, 2013; Grimaccia, Aghaei, Mussetta, Leva & Quater, 2015).
In this aspect a major solution can be to identify the most significant parameter or group of parameters which is most affected by the climate change, urbanization and machine failure. Then this few parameters can be monitored to control the impact on the HPP performance.
The solution can be practically adopted by the application of some intelligent soft-computation tools by which the most significant parameters can be identified in an unbiased and objective manner.