A spatiotemporal atlas of hydropower in Africa for energy modelling purposes

Sebastian Sterl; Albertine Devillers; Celray James Chawanda; Ann van Griensven; Wim Thiery; Daniel Russo

doi:10.12688/openreseurope.13392.1

A spatiotemporal atlas of hydropower in Africa for energy modelling purposes

Sebastian Sterl, Albertine Devillers, Celray James Chawanda, Ann van Griensven, Wim Thiery, Daniel Russo

Department of Water and Climate

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6 Citations (Scopus)

56 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The modelling of electricity systems with substantial shares of renewable resources, such as solar power, wind power and hydropower, requires datasets on renewable resource profiles with high spatiotemporal resolution to be made available to the energy modelling community. Whereas such resources exist for solar power and wind power profiles on diurnal and seasonal scales across all continents, this is not yet the case for hydropower. Here, we present a newly developed open-access African hydropower atlas, containing seasonal hydropower generation profiles for nearly all existing and several hundred future hydropower plants on the African continent. The atlas builds on continental-scale hydrological modelling in combination with detailed technical databases of hydropower plant characteristics and can facilitate modelling of power systems across Africa.

Original language	English
Article number	29
Number of pages	12
Journal	Open Research Europe
Volume	1
Issue number	29
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.13392.1 https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.13392.3
Publication status	Published - 2022

Keywords

Africa
Decarbonization
Energy modelling
Hydropower
Renewables
Resource profiles

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Sterl_etal_2022_OREFinal published version, 3.33 MBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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AU - Sterl, Sebastian

AU - Devillers, Albertine

AU - Chawanda, Celray James

AU - van Griensven, Ann

AU - Thiery, Wim

AU - Russo, Daniel

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

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AB - The modelling of electricity systems with substantial shares of renewable resources, such as solar power, wind power and hydropower, requires datasets on renewable resource profiles with high spatiotemporal resolution to be made available to the energy modelling community. Whereas such resources exist for solar power and wind power profiles on diurnal and seasonal scales across all continents, this is not yet the case for hydropower. Here, we present a newly developed open-access African hydropower atlas, containing seasonal hydropower generation profiles for nearly all existing and several hundred future hydropower plants on the African continent. The atlas builds on continental-scale hydrological modelling in combination with detailed technical databases of hydropower plant characteristics and can facilitate modelling of power systems across Africa.

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A spatiotemporal atlas of hydropower in Africa for energy modelling purposes

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