Q: Please briefly explain your role, involvement, and experience with hydropower engineering and the renewable energy landscape
Kate Gilmartin, British Hydropower Association (KG): The British Hydropower Association (BHA) is the leading trade membership association solely representing the interests of the UK hydropower industry and its associated stakeholders in the wider community. My mission is to drive growth in the sector by engaging, influencing and promoting hydropower, tidal range and pumped storage hydro, as firm, renewable power, providing critical infrastructure for achieving net-zero and energy security.
Mike Wynd, Drax (MW): I am the Head of Hydro for Drax, with responsibility for around 560MW of hydro and pumped storage capacity. I have been in the Power section for around 30 years with different responsibilities during that time, but with a large percentage of my time spent in the hydro/pumped storage section. I previously was involved in the upgrade of Cruachan Units 1&2 upgrade from 100MW to 120MW from 2002 to 2004. In addition, I was involved in the ROC refurbishment work which covered assets totalling 45MW of hydro power with units dating from the 1920s.
Volker Brost, Fichtner GmbH & Co. KG (VB): I am a member of the hydropower E&M group which is part of Fichtner’s Renewable Energies & Environment department. We strive to offer choice consultancy to our clients — government agencies, organisations, and companies alike — all over the world. Our assistance in hydropower covers both new construction and rehabilitation projects throughout all phases from feasibility study to execution and commissioning.
Richard Emery, Sulzer Services UK (RE): I have been involved in designing, maintaining, and repairing generators for many years at OEMs and Independent Service providers, such as Sulzer. Hydro projects are always most interesting, having been involved in projects in Arizona, Argentina and (near) Aberystwyth.
Robert Neumann, ANDRITZ Hydro (RN): When I changed from the telecom sector to the electric power generation and transmission business the annual added capacity of renewables was about 30 GW, counting about 20% of added capacity. Nowadays yearly 300 GW of renewables are added, and the share of added capacity is about 80%.
I accompanied this change in various technical roles in the wind, PV and now hydro sector. At ANDRITZ my role as Product Manager for Synchronous Condenser Systems requires me to “translate” the customers and market needs into technical product and service offerings, enabling our customers to strengthen the power grid in order to increase the ability to further integrate variable renewable energy sources.
Lucas Kunz, Voith Hydro (LK): I’ve been working with hydropower for more than 36 years. It all started at Siemens in São Paulo, where I did an internship during the final years of my studies. After I graduated in 1987, I immediately began working for Siemens. My profession has taken me around the world over the course of my career – from São Paulo to Berlin, to Shanghai and finally to York, Pennsylvania, where I have been working for the past 18 years. That sounds like a long time, but all I can say is I’m still learning and having a lot of fun working with hydropower.
Hydropower is clean, renewable, reliable, and versatile. And it is one of the few renewable energy sources that can be stored – with a storage volume much larger than any other existing battery solution. But what has always fascinated me the most throughout my professional career is the fact that no two rivers are the same. Whether we are looking at running of the river, regional and seasonal conditions, pump storage – there are always new challenges, and we need to adapt our technologies to achieve the required performance.
Jamie Maule, Cornwall Insight (JM): At Cornwall Insight, we specialise in providing consultation services and market research in the energy sector. Our team of experts use their knowledge and experience in the renewable energy landscape to help those inside and outside the industry navigate the ever-evolving policies and regulations in this field. Our work involves the use of sophisticated models to analyse and forecast future energy generation in Great Britain. Our team conducts in-depth research and analysis to track the progress of various renewable energy projects across the country and project their growth up to the end of the decade and beyond. One of the areas we work with is hydropower, which plays a crucial role in the overall energy mix of the UK. Through our research and analysis, we provide our clients with insights into the latest trends and developments in the hydropower sector and help them make informed decisions about their investments in this area.
David Menmuir, AECOM (DM): As a consultant I’ve worked with a wide variety of innovative low carbon energy technologies including energy from waste, biofuels, anaerobic digestion, carbon capture, hydrogen, hydropower, and other renewable energy technologies. This work has given me the opportunity to be involved in all stages of project development including feasibility analysis, equipment specification, design review, contractor procurement, project financing, construction, commissioning, and testing. I feel lucky to have been able to play a part in shaping the energy transition in the UK.
Q: What is the top challenge facing your industry at present?
KG: Grid constraints are a major barrier to all our net-zero ambitions, however, hydropower also has the issue that it has a high capital cost and incentive mechanisms do not favour technologies that have a lifetime of ~80Years.
MW: There is a challenge with the balance in the sustainability of the power that is produced and the impact that hydro and pumped storage has on the environment. This is a particular challenge with the development or extension of new sites.
VB: Within the UK the lead time for grid connections and planning permission is significant. Combined with the long build duration means that a pumped storage hydropower starting now is unlikely to be available until almost 2030. This makes the prospect of developing a new project a very substantial commitment to a developer.
RE: Recruitment – with manufacturing diminishing in the UK and a drop in apprentice schemes over recent decades we often have difficulty recruiting personnel with the required skillset.
RN: The electric power system is changing at fast pace since the beginning of the century. Increasing share of wind and solar generation will make significant changes and adaptation necessary to the electric power system, due to the continuously diminishing short circuit power and inertia of electric power systems. There are reliable, proven and cost-effective solutions, namely Synchronous Condensers, available to make this energy transition to a green energy system possible. The issue is the pace necessary: long permitting, planning, and execution times coupled with disturbed supply chains and the already happing retiring of the baby boomer generation, where many highly skilled and experienced engineers will leave the industry.
LK: We’re dealing with complex projects here. On the one hand, there are local regulatory processes, and we must understand these and know what the consequences of these requirements are for the customers. On the other hand, hydropower plants and dams are complex systems, their maintenance and modernisation require special knowledge and expertise. This is Voith’s greatest strength. You must decide and determine which components need to be replaced and which can stay. This can often only be decided after taking a close look at the on-site real-world conditions. There are always surprises, and the contracts have to be flexible enough to cover these surprises so that both sides have room to decide and execute the changes as needed.
JM: For us, and the energy sector at large, high energy prices, continued macroeconomic volatility, and the growing global competition for net-zero supply chains are all significant and interconnected challenges. To tackle these, there is a need for improved policy clarity and long-term planning.
DM: When working on energy transition projects it can seem like there is a bewildering array of emerging technologies and early-stage project development opportunities. It can be a challenge for developers and investors to rapidly identify which opportunities are likely to be progressed into fundable and successful projects. One of the most interesting and rewarding aspects of working with emerging technologies is being able to understand the diverse variety of risks involved in project development and help to identify and shape the most promising opportunities.
Q: How would you say your industry has evolved over the past two years?
KG: With energy security and grid stability higher up the agenda, hydropower, which is a winter baseload generator, should become more valued. With a further 1GW of hydropower developable with a strike price of £140-£180/MWh, hydropower should be incentivised to deliver generation that will match peak teatime winter demand.
MW: There is an awareness of the need to fully enhance the development with the deployment of solar/wind/battery technology together with hydro.
VB: Increasing penetration of offshore wind and solar into the national energy mix has driven the technical need for utility scale storage of electricity. This combined with the potential government support for long duration storage has driven huge interest in pumped storage.
RE: We have merged our three divisions (electrical, pumps and turbo) into a single services group.
RN: It has been an evolvement not only in the last two years, but slowly within the last decade, with a differentiation between developed and developing countries. In developing countries, we still have hydropower as the renewable source for electricity generation. In the developed world hydropower has changed to the role of an enabler for the integration of variable renewable energy (VRE). It's a permanent increasing demand for fast regulative operation of conventional hydropower as well as pump storage and Synchronous Condenser Systems to stabilise the grid.
LK: The availability of materials due to the global political crises is certainly a major challenge at the moment. Another issue is the shortage of skilled workers – many experienced hydropower experts will be retiring soon, others are migrating to what they perceive to be more modern fields. Hydropower, unfortunately, isn’t a young engineer’s dream job. We have to attract, train and retain skilled engineers. And, of course, we’re still reeling from the pandemic. The postponement of numerous projects in recent years has resulted in a backlog of work that must be addressed, especially given the pressing need for modernisation of a growing number of ageing hydropower plants.
JM: There have been many changes over the past two years as wholesale volatility and geopolitical shocks have brought energy to the forefront of political and civic debate. As such, the sector now finds itself with greater public responsibility and a greater role to play in the political domain while also working to achieve net-zero.
DM: With growing concerns about the environment and energy security, energy transition technologies continue to attract increasing levels of interest and investment. Hydrogen produced using electrolysis has been more widely recognised as a tool for decarbonisation and received attention from a variety of stakeholders. Appropriate usage of electrolytic hydrogen is a subject where different parties have strong and differing opinions. As the debate advances, we are beginning to see a more realistic and nuanced understanding of the relative merits of the different applications available.
Q: What developments are going on in your industry that may have an impact on the development of future approaches to hydropower?
KG: We are calling on changes to the capacity market and tweaks to the CfD mechanisms to allow more hydropower to be developed. With an 80% UK supply chain, the industry is poised to deliver.
MW: The deployment of battery technology for auxiliary services such as fast response will impact the financial viability of hydro development and deployment. The increase in size of these technologies will introduce competition for services.
VB: With regard to plant schemes, we see again a raised interest in pumped storage plants at the moment. Alongside other storage solutions, hydropower will play an essential role in the transformation to a carbon-free energy economy. Hydropower itself offers a well-known and proven technology as well as pioneering advancements, e.g. variable speed units or full-size power converters. Not to forget endeavours of co-location of hydropower with other generation and storage technologies.
RE: Online condition monitoring has now matured as a technology and allows improved reliability operation for new and old equipment.
RN: Additionally, to the already mentioned topics hydrogen will play an essential role on the way to a hopefully green future. To produce green hydrogen, you need a constant renewable energy source and large amount of water. So, the perfect solution is again hydropower. We expect that there will be in the next decade and beyond a necessary boost on exploration of hydro powered hydrogen plants.
Hydropower is currently the only low-carbon utility-scale source of synchronous generation, which provides a crucial service to the power grid called 'Low Carbon Inertia.' With the increasing integration of variable renewable energy (VRE) sources like wind and solar into the grid, the need for this service is growing. Hydropower's generation pattern is less volatile and more predictable than VRE sources, making it a valuable source of clean, reliable energy. As a result, the importance of hydropower is expected to increase in the coming years.
LK: We are currently entering a phase where the entire global fleet of hydropower plants is beginning to show signs of ageing. Many plants are more than 40 years old and haven’t been upgraded to any great extent – which, in principle, is an argument in favour of hydropower. Modernisations offer the opportunity to increase the capacity of a power plant without changing the structural facilities. This is a considerable advantage over the construction of new plants because construction accounts for 80 percent of the costs in a new plant project, while the electromechanical components only account for 20 percent. This means that if you only have to invest in the latter, because the structure is already there, the financial return is much higher than building a new plant.
JM: From our perspective there are three main issues. First, the rising cost of capital for renewables projects means that sites are more expensive to develop as investors require a higher rate of return for investments in the UK’s equity markets. Second, greater competition at a global level (particularly from the US and EU) has the potential to relocate vital supply chains and skew development of net-zero technologies in the UK. Third, the ongoing Review of Electricity Market Arrangements (REMA) could fundamentally redesign the GB electricity market, introducing new market signals which may disadvantage generation and dispatch in power-rich but population-sparse areas of the country.
DM: Hydropower has a long history of providing energy to industry, from grain processing and textiles to aluminium smelting and data centres. An emerging demand for low carbon hydrogen creates a range of new opportunities for collaboration between industry and hydropower. A greater interaction between the energy sector and industry is a positive evolution and creates opportunities for both generators and energy intensive industries.
We are also seeing that the rising penetration of intermittent renewables is increasing demand for energy storage, dispatchable power and grid support services. This is creating opportunities for new pumped storage capacity and impacting the way in which revenue is maximised from hydropower sites.
Q: What will you be presenting at the Hydropower Engineering 2023 seminar and how will this benefit participants?
KG: I will be presenting on how and why the UK needs to make the most of our generous indigenous energy resources and the policy changes that the BHA are calling for to unlock hydropower, pumped storage hydro and tidal range.
MW: I will be presenting the development of the potential upgrade of Units 3&4 at Cruachan Power Station. This will cover the assessment of the units, the options that were considered and the historical issues with these units. This will then enable a sharing of how this was approached in the development of the scope of work.
VB: The presented water battery concept is a co-location pilot. In the “Naturstromspeicher Gaildorf” three wind energy plants and a hydropower plant are installed in proximity. As such it is an innovative approach to combine volatile wind power production with the power balancing capabilities of a pumped storage plant. The approach features benefits regarding planning, building permits and construction at the early project stages and, once in operation, immediate load balancing with reduced impact on the grid. On the other hand, this unique concept involves new challenges regarding the transient behaviour. My presentation is going to provide an insight into the initial plant arrangement and required modifications that were verified by means of hydraulic transient simulations.
RE: I will be presenting a paper on a hydro generator upgrade. As an electrical engineer it will be interesting to demonstrate how mechanical and electrical design requirements interact as the two disciplines are intertwined in our industry.
RN: I will explain why synchronous machines are essential in the electric power system, and how the situation is changing with variable renewable energy (VRE) sources, mainly PV and wind. Participants will better understand the requirements from the transmission and distribution network, and the value of hydropower with its synchronous generations brings to the system. It will show what the contributions and limits of Synchronous Condenser Systems are in terms of short circuit contribution in MVA (increasing system strength), inertia in MWs and reactive power compensation in MVAr.
LK: I will be leading a discussion on the modernisation of power plants as one of the most effective ways to produce more energy while generating less carbon footprint.
JM: I will be presenting on the energy landscape at large. This will give the attendees a view of the broader opportunities and challenges present in the market, allowing them to situate hydropower within this framework.
DM: The presentation will include an overview of the technical characteristics of electrolytic hydrogen production and how these may influence the opportunities available for project development. Key risk factors relating to hydrogen projects will be discussed. The aim here will be to help delegates develop and identify schemes that are more likely to attract funding and progress into successful projects. Finally, there will be an overview of a couple of hydropower to hydrogen projects that AECOM is working on.
Q: Which other speakers and presentations are you looking forward to hearing at the forthcoming seminar?
KG: I’m looking forward to hearing all the speakers.
MW: I tend to like all of the different presentations as it generates ideas for the sites. Subjects may not, at first, be relevant but can generate ideas for consideration in the Drax fleet. Thus, I am very keen to go with an open mind to the seminar for that reason.
VB: As an enthusiastic supporter of renewable energies, I am looking forward to the presentation on the Mersey Tidal Power Project by Shaun Benzon.
RE: I enjoy learning about solutions to engineering problems.
RN: There are many interesting topics covered, I am looking forward to the presentations from David Menmuir about Integrating Hydropower with Hydrogen Production and the presentation from Elena Vagnoni about the Operation Optimisation for Flexible Hydroelectric Units.
LK: There is an amazing collection of subjects at this seminar. It’s hard to decide where I should begin. I will start from the end.
I’m looking forward to David Menmuir’s presentation. At Voith we have also been developing energy solutions using hydrogen. And of course, the obvious place where you find water and energy available is a hydropower plant.
We were recently awarded another project to design and install a new pump-storage plant with a variable speed machine to allow for flexible operation. I am eager to hear what Elena Vagnoni has to say about this current subject.
Along the same subject of grid stability, I’m interested in seeing Robert Neumann’s presentation. Voith has recently supplied a couple of Synchronous Condenser units after 30+ years from when we supplied the last one.
I’m also very curious about Cruachan and Gaildorf as well. It is going to be a very interesting day.
JM: While all of the presentations sound interesting, I am particularly looking forward to Robert Neumann’s discussion of hydropower and synchronous condenser systems.
DM: I’m looking forward to hearing from speakers covering topics relating to the evolving relationship between hydropower assets with the energy market. This will include the provision of grid services, the role of pumped storage, and technical considerations for refurbishment projects.
I also really like attending this kind of event because it is a great opportunity to expand your knowledge by hearing from speakers on subjects at the periphery of your normal area of work. It is always hard to predict exactly where the interesting points will come from and from the proposed line-up there could be many.
Q: Why is it important for engineers and industry to come together at this event and share best practice?
KG: Feeding engineering know how into how the industry effectively lobbies for change is crucial to effective systems outputs.
MW: Why not? I talk about corporate memory and learning from incidents and failures. If we, as a collective, can share a “hydro” corporate memory then it can only benefit the sector.
VB: This will be a good opportunity to look beyond the horizon of one’s own field of work and I feel this is currently of utmost importance. Climate change is becoming manifest in many countries worldwide and we need to achieve the transition to a carbon-free economy within the next decade. Therefore, renewable energies have to be promoted much better than over the last decades.
RE: These events are quite rare and it’s great to have real world examples as these are easily understood by engineers and commercial colleagues alike.
RN: Industry seminars and conferences have always been a very good source for sharing best practice examples. Meeting physically at events suffered the last years a bit and often the off-line discussions at such events are most beneficial.
LK: Exchanging experience is the best way to grow in this business. Anytime you find experts willing to share their knowledge, take advantage. There are not many books that would allow you otherwise to collect this information. I bring information to share, and I will also return to our office with a bag full of new information. As I said on my first lines, I’m still learning and having a lot of fun working with hydropower.
JM: Hearing from colleagues across the energy sector is always a beneficial experience as it allows us to share insights and ideas. This has been particularly prescient over the past two years as the energy sector has been met with increasing challenges.
DM: The energy sector and its interaction with other industries is undergoing an exciting period of transformation. This type of changing environment creates opportunities and challenges for companies. To understand the situation and make valuable contributions as professionals it is necessary to hear different ideas and perspectives. This event is set to be a great forum for knowledge sharing and learning.
The Hydropower Engineering 2023 seminar will be taking place on 1 June at the Glasgow Science Centre.
Join this event to:
- Deepen your knowledge of contemporary projects in pumped storage, tidal energy and conventional hydropower engineering
- Hear insights from key hydropower operators and manufacturers
- Address challenges associated with the operation, maintenance and refurbishment of hydropower plants
- Learn about the challenges of grid network stability, and the role of hydropower in supporting the further adoption of intermittent renewable energy sources
- Meet developers, consultants, manufacturers and other players in hydropower to glean insights and shape strategies
To book your place, please visit www.imeche.org/hydropower.