Digital Solutions for Improving the Sustainability Performance and Flexibility Potential of Hydropower Assets

The European energy system is undergoing a major transformation that focuses on decarbonization, ensuring a secure supply, and integrating renewable energy sources into the market. This shift presents both opportunities and challenges for energy stakeholders. Hydropower plays a crucial role in this transformation. It is a renewable and sustainable source of electricity that can help stabilize and add flexibility to the European power system. Additionally, hydropower reduces the EU’s reliance on fossil fuel imports and provides additional benefits such as supporting irrigation, water supply, and flood control in river basins. This makes it a key technology for achieving Europe’s decarbonization goals and maintaining a leadership position in renewable energy.

The D HYDROFLEX project will advance excellence in research on digital technology for hydropower paving the way towards more efficient, more sustainable, and more competitive hydropower plants in modern power markets. It will develop a toolkit for digitally ‘renovating’ the existing hydroelectric power plants based on sensors, digital twins, AI algorithms, hybridization modelling (power-to-hydrogen), cloud-edge computing and image processing. The core pillars of the project will be digitalization, flexibility, and sustainability. Validation will take place in real hydro plants of EDF (France), TEE (Poland), PPC (Greece), TASGA (Spain) and INTEX (Romania), covering different geographical areas of Europe.