ReHydro: Our latest contribution to the European hydropower sector gets underway
ReHydro: Demonstration of Sustainable Hydropower Refurbishment, a Horizon Europe Project, kicked off in Brussels on the 28th of May 2024. Running for a period of 4 years, with 22 European partners over 7 different countries, the ReHydro project aims to enhance the impact of hydropower within the electrical grid by upgrading and refurbishing hydropower plants to make them more sustainable and more flexible.
Modernising and refurbishing European Hydropower
Hydropower made up almost 30% EU’s renewable electricity production in 2022.1 Pumped storage hydropower provides more than 90% of all stored energy in the world.2 Hydropower is undeniably a massive resource for achieving energy transition goals, however in today’s climate, it faces challenges such as water availability and extreme weather events, ecosystem disruption and biodiversity loss, aging infrastructure, regulatory and policy challenges and social and community issues.
Under the leadership of SINTEF, ReHydro aims to combat these issues by demonstrating how European hydropower can be refurbished and modernised, rendering it fit for a leading role in the future power system, all while respecting sustainability requirements and societal needs within the context of a changing climate.
A broad approach to boost European leadership and competitiveness
The ReHydro project will take a comprehensive approach to the refurbishment of European Hydropower. Its actions are organised around 3 main pillars tackling the technical, economic and environmental aspects of repairing and upgrading hydropower plants.
The project will propose new methods and tools to increase European hydropower capacity through the refurbishment and upgrading of existing hydropower implantations. It aims to provide new sustainable solutions that are replicable at European and global levels.
It will focus not only on the technical solutions needed to achieve these refurbishment goals but will also consider hydropower’s place within the future energy market, within society, and will seek to better understand the impact of hydropower production on surrounding waterway ecosystems.
Real-life demonstrations
ReHydro will draw on 5 demonstrator sites across Europe to test, implement and showcase the solutions developed within each pillar of the project. These sites will provide crucial real-world test environments, allowing the consortium to develop and improve its solutions, applications and technologies and provide real-world data of the refurbishments’ performance and impact in real time.
SuperGrid Institute’s implication
Building on our expertise in energy markets and flexibility developed during the XFLEX HYDRO project, we will be leading the work package which will look at the modernisation process across the sector and determine if it is currently fit to deliver the future flexibility needed by the power grid while preserving natural resources as expected by society.
Our team will investigate the modernisation process of hydro companies now, and in the near future, and analyse their main drivers & motivations for modernisation (environment, flexibility, maintenance, etc.). As part of this work, we will organise workshops with utilities inside and outside of the project to learn about their processes and drivers for refurbishment with the aim of building an EU-wide picture of hydropower needs. These motivations will then be examined from a business perspective, to understand how they are justified to management and how they are then financed.
The goal is to identify the roadblocks within the modernisation process which prevent hydropower from remaining the largest renewable source of flexibility on the grid while becoming more sustainable.
