Projects by Discipline / Water Resources Planning and Management

El Dorado Irrigation District Project 184 Daily Operations Model

 
The El Dorado Irrigation District’s Project 184 stores and diverts water from the South Fork of the American River for municipal water supply and hydroelectric power production. The project consists of four water storage reservoirs, a diversion canal and conveyance facilities, and a forebay and 20 MW power plant. In late 2006, The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a new operating license for the project. The license contains many new operating criteria that significantly complicate and constrain operation of the system.

The District retained Hydrosphere, well known for its expertise in Riverware™ technology, to develop a daily operations model for short-term reservoir operations. The model helps EID meet the complex instream flow and reservoir storage requirements of the new FERC license as well as support mid-range planning to improve hydropower generation and municipal water supply delivery forecasts. Future enhancements will include water rights accounting and hydropower optimization.

For this project, Hydrosphere’s RiverWare team:

• Developed a daily timestep operations model of the Project 184 system using RiverWare
• Identified reservoir operating policies according to the recently renewed FERC license and EID operational objectives
• Designed and implemented operating rules:
  • According to the newly developed policies
  • For hydropower releases
  • To meet instream flow targets
  • To meet water supply demands
• Created custom tools to adapt the RiverWare model for both short-term operations and long-term planning and forecasting
• Trained clients and provided technical support for the planning and operations models
  

Hydrosphere continues to work with the El Dorado Irrigation District to:

• Develop snowmelt forecasts for predicting spring runoff
• Develop tools for short-term inflow forecasting
• Enhance the model to provide statistics for reservoir storage given a variety of hydrologic conditions