wmpy-power: A Python package for process-based regional hydropower simulation

wmpy-power is a hydropower simulation model developed to support long-term planning and climate impacts studies. It simulates hydropower production at the facility-scale using simulations of managed streamflow and reservoir storage to account for the “non-stationarity” in hydropower generation to changes in hydrology, and the non-linearity in the effect that climate change has on water management. Alternative approaches for estimating hydropower use statistical methods that relate runoff directly to hydropower generation and potentially miss the complex interactions arising from human water management, and hydropower production as water availability changes.

wmpy-power is a process-based model that incorporates hydropower facility characteristics and timeseries of streamflow and reservoir storage, and balances the need for an explicit representation of physical processes at the facility scale with a need to work with scarce data and handle biases in the data. The model is designed to simulate an entire region of hydropower facilities in bulk, where the details required to simulate each facility are incomplete. The model also accounts for biases in the input timeseries given that it was designed to work with simulations of streamflow and reservoir storage. wmpy-power is unique as a hydropower simulation model in that it explicitly simulates individual facilities using a process-based approach, with less of a data requirement than other process-based models. The tradeoff is a decrease in accuracy at the facility scale, but the model is suitable for the regional scale to support long-term planning.