Water management agencies seek the next generation of modeling tools for planning and operating river basins. Previous site‐specific models such as U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's (USBR) Colorado River Simulation System and Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA) Daily Scheduling Model have become obsolete; however, new models are difficult and expensive to develop and maintain. Previous generalized river basin modeling tools are limited in their ability to represent diverse physical system and operating policy details for a wide range of applications. RiverWare(tm), a new generalized river basin modeling tool, provides a construction kit for developing and running detailed, site‐specific models without the need to develop or maintain the supporting software within the water management agency. It includes an extensible library of modeling algorithms, several solvers, and a rich “language” for the expression of operating policy. Its point‐and‐click graphical interface facilitates model construction and execution, and communication of policies, assumptions and results to others. Applications developed and used by the TVA and the USBR demonstrate that a wide range of operational and planning problems on widely varying basins can be solved using this tool.

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The integration of large amounts of variable renewable generation can increase the demand on flexible resources in the power system. Conventional hydropower can be an important asset for managing variability and uncertainty in the power system, but multipurpose reservoirs are often limited by nonpower constraints. Previous large-scale variable generation integration studies have simulated the operation of the electric system under different penetration levels but often with simplified representations of hydropower to avoid complex nonpower constraints. This paper illustrates the value of bridging the gap between power system models and detailed hydropower models with a demonstration case. The United States Western Interconnection is modeled with PLEXOS, and ten large reservoirs on the Columbia River are modeled with RiverWare. The results show the effect of detailed hydropower modeling on the power system and its benefits to the power system, such as the decrease in overall production cost and the reduction of variable generation curtailment.

Managing energy, water, and environmental priorities and constraints within a cascade hydropower system is a challenging multiobjective optimization effort that requires advanced modeling and forecasting tools. Within the mid-Columbia River system, there is currently a lack of specific solutions for predicting how coordinated operational decisions can mitigate the impacts of total dissolved gas (TDG) supersaturation while satisfying multiple additional policy and hydropower generation objectives. In this study, a reduced-order TDG uptake equation is developed that predicts tailrace TDG at seven hydropower facilities on the mid-Columbia River. The equation is incorporated into a general multiobjective river, reservoir, and hydropower optimization tool as a prioritized operating goal within a broader set of system-level objectives and constraints. A test case is presented to assess the response of TDG and hydropower generation when TDG supersaturation is optimized to remain under state water-quality standards. Satisfaction of TDG as an operating goal is highly dependent on whether constraints that limit TDG uptake are implemented at a higher priority than generation requests. According to the model, an opportunity exists to reduce TDG supersaturation and meet hydropower generation requirements by shifting spillway flows to different time periods. A coordinated effort between all project owners is required to implement systemwide optimized solutions that satisfy the operating policies of all stakeholders.