Aida Tayebiyan - PhD, Environmental Health Engineering Research Center, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran
Thamer Ahmad Mohammad - Professor, Faculty of Engineering, Department of Civil Engineering, Universiti Putra Malaysia, ۴۳۳۰۰ Serdang, Malaysia

Background: Several reservoir systems have been constructed for hydropower generation around theworld. Hydropower offers an economical source of electricity with reduce carbon emissions. Therefore,it is such a clean and renewable source of energy. Reservoirs that generate hydropower are typicallyoperated with the goal of maximizing energy revenue. Yet, reservoir systems are inefficiently operatedand manage according to policies determined at the construction time. It is worth noting that with littleenhancement in operation of reservoir system, there could be an increase in efficiency of the scheme formany consumers.Methods: This research develops simulation-optimization models that reflect discrete hedging policy(DHP) to manage and operate hydropower reservoir system and analyse it in both single and multireservoirsystem. Accordingly, three operational models (2 single reservoir systems and 1 multi-reservoirsystem) were constructed and optimized by genetic algorithm (GA). Maximizing the total powergeneration in horizontal time is chosen as an objective function in order to improve the functionalefficiency in hydropower production with consideration to operational and physical limitations. Theconstructed models, which is a cascade hydropower reservoirs system have been tested and evaluated inthe Cameron Highland and Batang Padang in Malaysia.Results: According to the given results, usage of DHP for hydropower reservoir system operation couldincrease the power generation output to nearly 13% in the studied reservoir system compared to presentoperating policy (TNB operation). This substantial increase in power production will enhance economicdevelopment. Moreover, the given results of single and multi-reservoir systems affirmed that hedgingpolicy could manage the single system much better than operation of the multi-reservoir system.Conclusion: It can be summarized that DHP is an efficient and feasible policy, which could be used forthe operation of existing or new hydropower reservoir system.

Optimization, Hedging policy, Reservoir operating rule, Genetic algorithm, Hydropowerreservoir system, Clean energy