A spatiotemporal atlas of hydropower in Africa for energy modelling purposes

Sebastian Sterl; Albertine Devillers; Celray James Chawanda; Ann van Griensven; Wim Thiery; Daniel Russo

doi:10.12688/openreseurope.13392.3

A spatiotemporal atlas of hydropower in Africa for energy modelling purposes

Open Res Eur. 2022 Mar 29:1:29. doi: 10.12688/openreseurope.13392.3. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Sebastian Sterl^{1

2

3

4}, Albertine Devillers^{4

5}, Celray James Chawanda¹, Ann van Griensven^{1

6}, Wim Thiery¹, Daniel Russo⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Hydrology and Hydraulic Engineering, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, 1050, Belgium.
² Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, 3001, Belgium.
³ Center for Development Research (ZEF), University of Bonn, Bonn, 53113, Germany.
⁴ International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), Bonn, 53113, Germany.
⁵ Mines ParisTech, Paris, 75272, France.
⁶ IHE-Delft Institute for Water Education, Westvest 7, Delft, 2611AX, The Netherlands.

Abstract

The modelling of electricity systems with substantial shares of renewable resources, such as solar power, wind power and hydropower, requires datasets on renewable resource profiles with high spatiotemporal resolution to be made available to the energy modelling community. Whereas such resources exist for solar power and wind power profiles on diurnal and seasonal scales across all continents, this is not yet the case for hydropower. Here, we present a newly developed open-access African hydropower atlas, containing seasonal hydropower generation profiles for nearly all existing and several hundred future hydropower plants on the African continent. The atlas builds on continental-scale hydrological modelling in combination with detailed technical databases of hydropower plant characteristics and can facilitate modelling of power systems across Africa.

Keywords: Africa; Hydropower; decarbonization; energy modelling; renewables; resource profiles.

Grants and funding

This work was performed under the project CIREG (Climate Information for Integrated Renewable Electricity Generation), which is part of ERA4CS, an ERA-NET Co-fund action initiated by JPI Climate, funded by BMBF (DE), FORMAS (SE), BELSPO (BE) and IFD (DK) with co-funding from the European Union's Horizon2020 Framework Program (Grant 690462). Further, the work benefitted from a mobility grant provided to S.S. through EIT InnoEnergy.