PNNL

Modern hydropower decisions are complicated

Hydropower owner-operators face increasingly difficult decisions in our era of changing climate and more interconnected systems and feedbacks. Operators must balance power production with needs for grid services, water supply, flood control, and environmental management, as well as other demands. Striking the right balance requires operators to consider and coordinate asset operations at watershed to basin scales. Informed decision-making for multiuse watersheds demands the development of an interconnected system of systems (an “intelligent system”) that comprehensively connects information chains from data to decision across scales.

Intelligent systems can help

An intelligent system creates data-to-decision pathways by digitally linking sensing systems, data management systems, and analysis tools to inform decisions. These systems can operate autonomously or with human input along the information pathway. Intelligent systems for water resources are rapidly being adopted at the household and facility scales; however, they have yet to enjoy such interest at watershed scales.

With support from the Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office, researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a roadmap for enhancing watershed intelligence.

What is an intelligent watershed?

An intelligent watershed is an advanced watershed resource management system that coordinates actions of interdependent agents that gather, manage, analyze, and respond to information to meet their unique community and stakeholder needs. It is an end-to-end system that connects raw data to actionable decisions across a watershed. 

Intelligent watersheds require coordination between interconnected resources, infrastructure, and managers to enable shared decision-making and efficient operations that support beneficial, sustainable, and equitable management of resources. Despite the growing automation and digitization of watershed management, humans are involved in every stage of the data-to-decision pipeline. 

Diverse perspectives are critical to watershed intelligence

An integral part of developing a roadmap to intelligent watersheds was thoughtful engagement with diverse stakeholder groups interested in hydropower and other water management decisions. Through interviews and virtual meetings with subject matter experts, the research team defined technological gaps and opportunities, found connections and synergies in stakeholder perceptions, and identified the social, institutional, and practical barriers to intelligent watersheds. The stakeholder engagement ensured roadmap development was inclusive of a variety of perspectives, interests, geographic jurisdictions, and scientific sectors. 

A roadmap to intelligent watersheds

Central to the roadmap is the ultimate goal of watershed intelligence: sustainable management of multi-purpose watershed systems in a way that increasingly focuses human engagement where it returns the most benefit. 

The roadmap details current gaps and limitations to intelligent watersheds, as well as potential solutions and opportunities to address these barriers, within an energy and environmental justice framework. Aligning the information in the roadmap with the core tenets of energy and environmental justice is an important element in acknowledging the limitations of established decision-making processes and beginning to address unfair distributions of benefits and burdens across communities and stakeholders in a watershed. 

For more information, contact Vincent Tidwell (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) and Carly Hansen (Oak Ridge National Laboratory).