Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is seeking a hydropower utility to collaborate on a case study, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO), to understand how small hydro plants operating at 10 MW or less can be upgraded to provide emergency power to critical loads during outages.
Examples of critical loads include hospitals and emergency service providers.
INL’s Hydro Hybrids team developed guidelines for modifying run-of-river plants, which typically rely on power from the grid when the facility is starting up or otherwise not already generating electricity. The study would determine the necessary upgrades for a plant to restart and maintain emergency services in a blackout without any external power from the grid (referred to as “black start”).
There is no cost-share commitment, but INL would require the utility to provide plant specifications and data. INL staff will protect the data during the project, and anonymized data will be published in the case study to inform other hydropower owners.
This effort builds on the successes of previous field demonstrations, INL said. In 2021, INL partnered with Idaho Falls Power, a municipally owned utility, to demonstrate how its five hydropower plants could be configured and modified to improve frequency response and maintain stability with larger loads during black start when paired with an ultracapacitor.
Ultracapacitors, which store and quickly discharge large amounts of energy, provided oscillation damping and fast frequency response to the generating plants. To isolate the city’s plants and test them in various configurations, two 4-MW load banks were brought in. A load bank is a unit filled with resistive heater elements that draws the current and dissipates it in the form of heat. Researchers use load banks to test how an electric generation source will react when disconnected from its normal load.
This 2021 demonstration proved that small hydropower plants combined with integrated energy storage technologies could be responsive enough to replace natural gas during a black start in some cases.
INL also collaborated in 2023 with Fall River Rural Electric Cooperative to show how retrofitted and upgraded plant components and systems (hydro governor controls and protection circuits) could allow the co-op’s hydropower plants to run independently from the grid to provide emergency power to critical loads.
“The current call for collaborators is not intended to seek field test participants, but to gather specific data needed to design a minimal upgrade package that facilitates black starting small hydropower plants,” said Yemi Ojo, a clean energy postdoctoral research associate for INL.
Battelle Energy Alliance manages INL for DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy. INL is the nation’s center for nuclear energy research and development, celebrating 75 years of scientific innovations in 2024. The laboratory performs research in each of DOE’s strategic goal areas: energy, national security, science and the environment.