Flooding is a natural hazard with dire economic consequences that can even threaten human lives in extreme cases (Jonkman, 2005). The impact of flooding can become extremely severe particularly in densely populated urban areas. Consequently, the accurate estimation of urban flooding has become an integral component of flood risk management and assessment in times of climate change (Hettiarachchi et al., 2018;Jenkins et al., 2017;Liu et al., 2018) and rapid urbanization (Chen et al., 2015), while it is also needed to support adaptation strategies (Zhou et al., 2018).Urban flooding is a complicated phenomenon due to intricate urban layouts, with flows in various branches meeting in junctions (Riviere et al., 2011;Schindfessel et al., 2015) or being divided in bifurcations (El Kadi Abderrezzak et al., 2011;Momplot et al., 2017). Hence, urban flooding needs to be modeled at least as two-dimensional (2D) shallow flow (Arrault et al., 2016;Mignot et al., 2006) without any further simplifications, such as those that can be done in, for example, river flooding in more rural areas (Kitsikoudis et al., 2020).
Underground pumped-storage hydropower (UPSH) is a promising technology to manage the electricity production in flat regions. UPSH plants consist of an underground and surface reservoirs. The energy is stored by pumping water from the underground to the surface reservoir and is produced by discharging water from the surface to the underground reservoir. The underground reservoir can be drilled, but a more efficient alternative, considered here, consists in using an abandoned mine. Given that mines are rarely waterproofed, there are concerns about the consequences (on the efficiency and the environment) of water exchanges between the underground reservoir and the surrounding medium. This work investigates numerically such water exchanges and their consequences. Numerical models are based on a real abandoned mine located in Belgium (Martelange slate mine) that is considered as a potential site to construct an UPSH plant. The model integrates the geometrical complexity of the mine, adopts an operation scenario based on actual electricity prices, simulates the behavior of the system during one year and considers two realistic scenarios of initial conditions with the underground reservoir being either completely full or totally drained. The results show that (1) water exchanges may have important consequences in terms of efficiency and environmental impacts, (2) the influence of the initial conditions is only relevant during early times, and (3), an important factor controlling the water exchanges and their consequences may be the relative location of the natural piezometric head with respect the underground reservoir.
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