The water footprint from hydroelectricity: a case study for a hydropower plant in Romania

Abstract

In Romania, the hydropower is the main form of renewable source with an important share in energy mix. Despite their valuable advantages on supplying energy and balancing the energy system, public acceptance, environmental, social and economic impact has become a common challenge in development of hydropower projects. Increasing of water consumption and raising awareness regarding available water resources leads to an integrated management approach of them. In this paper the water footprint is estimated for one of the largest Romanian hydropower project, namely Hydropower Plant Vidraru. The water footprint from hydroelectricity is evaluated considering electricity production of the hydropower plant, water footprint of dam construction and three different approaches to quantify water footprint of the reservoir: gross water consumption, net water consumption and water balance. Also, water footprint is assessed based on economic value of the reservoir using allocation coefficients for various purposes of the reservoir. It is estimated that economic benefit of the reservoir is 81.92·106 €/y, with hydroelectricity major contributor.

Water Footprints and Virtual Water Flows Embodied in the Power Supply Chain

“…Besides hydropower generation, more than 40% of the world's reservoirs have multiple purposes, such as irrigation, residential and industrial water supply, flood protection, fishing and recreation, and more [37]. An economic benefit model was used for water consumption allocation in multipurpose reservoirs, and the results showed that hydropower was the major contributor to economic benefits [38]. The orange diamond marker in Figure 5 represents the process-based method at the regional level [34].…”

Srovnání různých metod stanovení vodní stopy výroby elektrické energie ve vodní elektrárně Orlík – případová studie

“…Robescu a Bondrea [24] spočítaly vodní stopu spojenou s výstavbou hráze vodní elektrárny Vidraru na 19,7 mil. m 3 při objemu hráze 480 000 m 3 , tj.…”

“…Robescu and Bondrea [24] calculated the water footprint associated with the construction of the dam for the Vidraru HPS to be 19.7 million m 3 , with the dam volume being 480,000 m 3 (i.e., 41 m 3 per m 3 of the concrete dam). Using this information and the volume of Orlík hydraulic structure of about 1.1 million m 3 , the water footprint of Orlík dam is 45.1 million m 3 , or (considering 100 years of service life) 4.51 million m 3 per year.…”

Hydrodynamic water tunnel for characterization of hydrokinetic microturbines designs

“…Mekonnen and Hoekstra 2012 calculate the blue water footprint of 35 taken from selected hydropower plants in a variety of places in the world (representing some 8% of the total installed capacity) concluding that the water evaporation was equivalent to the 10% of the one that corresponds to the global crop production in a year. Other studies show the importance of the water footprint in different locations, such as New Zealand (Herath et al 2011 ) where most of the energy production is generated by hydropower, Romania (Robescu and Bondrea 2019 ) or China (Zhang et al 2019 ).…”