Consideration of climate change impacts on a hydropower scheme in Iran.

Climate change is likely to significantly affect hydropower generation in the future. It is important to assess the impacts of climate change on hydropower plants for their optimal and cost-effective design. This article proposes a modeling framework for assessing climate change impacts on a potential hydropower plant in Iran. A modified version of the LARS-WG model (M-LARS-WG) was used for downscaling the simulations of two global climate models, CanESM2 and HadGEM2, for three emission scenarios RCP2.6, RCP4.5, and RCP8.5, and generating 50 sets of daily weather variables, each covering a 30-year period for the historical period and each future scenario. The generated data was introduced into a calibrated HBV hydrological model to simulate the daily streamflow series of the basin. Finally, the Modified Standard Operating Policy (MSOP) model was employed to simulate reservoir water level and power plant productions under climate change scenarios. The rank-sum test showed the similarity in the average of M-LARS-WG simulated and observed variables in each month at 5% significance. The HBV model estimated the observed streamflow with a Nash–Sutcliffe coefficient of 0.83 during validation. The output of the modeling framework revealed the changes in annual streamflow ranging from a decrease of 35% to an increase of 90% during 2035–2064 compared to the historical period for different climate change scenarios. This would change the hydropower generation between − 25 and + 2% compared to the historical period. The study indicates the importance of considering climate change impacts on hydropower plant design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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