Integrating Renewables with Pumped Hydro Storage in Brazil: a Case Study

The share of Variable Renewable Electricity (VRE) is expected to increase in the Brazilian power grid in the next few years due to favorable conditions which include economic performance and resource availability. Wind and solar photovoltaic projects will likely lead new capacity investments. While existing hydropower can support this growth, in the long run, difficulties for the development of new hydro plants will make it harder for the power system to integrate VRE. The standard option is to build new open cycle gas turbine plants, which provide capacity to supply peak demand and reserves, but at the expense of increasing the emission of greenhouse gases. An alternative is to develop another flexible resource: Pump Hydro Storage (PHS). We advocate the following process to examine this alternative: (1) the use of specialized geoprocessing algorithms that operate on a digital terrain model to screen for most promising sites for the construction of PHS; (2) the use of an engineering module to design PHS candidate projects in the selected sites and calculate their costs; (3) the use of an Integrated Resource Planning optimization model a study to evaluate the set of candidates that are selected. In addition, at the project-specific level, hybrid PHS + solar PV projects can be optimized and then integrated into the grid as a "system of systems" to improve grid stability, reliability, robustness and resiliency.