Sustainability Assessment of the Bui Hydropower System

Abstract

Sustainable hydroelectric projects are judged by their contribution to sustainable development, long-term viability, and ability to integrate sustainability goals. This paper analyses the Bui hydroelectric dam in Ghana vis-à-vis these expectations using sustainability indices. A multi-criteria analysis tool, APIS (Aggregated Preference Indices System), is used to build indices for Bui dam for four hydrologic seasons. An analysis of the indicators used revealed that environmental indicators are weightiest and economic indicators have the least weight. Comparative analysis of the Bui dam project shows 40%, 36%, 18%, and 6% priority for technical, economic, social, and environmental criteria, respectively, during its implementation stages. Per estimation of this work, the general sustainability index of the Bui dam is between 0.4 and 0.6 on a scale of 0 to 1. The impact of seasonal climate change will reduce the index to below 0.5 for three hydrologic seasons. The results show that Bui dam has an average but weak index of sustainability. Multi-criteria analysis offers quality assessment of energy projects, which is valuable for analyzing proposed or existing energy projects. This paper shows the possibility of using multi-criteria analysis approach to assess the sustainability of a hydroelectric dam. The approach offers a quantitative and qualitative assessment of a hydroelectric dam via a suitable choice of indicators.

Sustainable Hydroelectric Dam Management in the Context of Climate Change: Case of the Taabo Dam in Côte D’Ivoire, West Africa

“…The power density (PD) is an environmental index which measures the environmental impact of a hydroelectric dam. It is defined by the ratio of installed capacity to area inundated by a hydroelectric dam [19,39,40]. We define the power density at an instance i, in time, is given by…”

“…The threshold value FNF is the long-term average of all FNF i which is estimated as 0.25243. We compute the impact FNF as: (19) Flooding Due to Artificial Flow (FAF) Kossou Dam is the source of artificial flows into Taabo Lake, so we estimate FAF using…”

“…Contribution to National Grid is defined as the contribution of Taabo Hydroelectric Dam to the grid, compared to total contribution into the grid, expressed by [19] as:…”

“…We use EAF to estimate the availability of the Taabo Hydroelectric Dam for power production, taking into account the reliability of generation units [19,44]. The EAF for a specific period i, in time, was estimated using the following equation:…”

“…Calabria, Camanho, and Zanella, 2018 [17], made use of composite indicators to evaluate the performance of 78% installed capacity Brazilian hydropower plants. Some studies have used a multi-criteria analysis approach to perform a quality assessment for hydroelectric schemes [18,19]. Thus, the use of indicators, both quantitative and qualitative, for hydropower sustainability assessment has increased over the last few years.…”