From Data to Decisions - Optimizing Hydropower Investments at CADRE AS

With unparalleled expertise in small-scale hydropower, CADRE AS operates in key regions across Norway. Their expertise starts at waterway leasing, and reaches to project design & development, as well as hydropower plant operations. Looking to integrate the newest technologies in their decision-making process, they partnered with HYDROGRID to tap into the full potential of their  data.

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Objective - Hardware Investment

In this particular case, a CADRE AS owned plant was considered for refurbishment and/ or project expansion with an additional turbine.

HYDROGRID’s Investment Decision Simulation module helped the team use the historical data available from daily operations of the hydropower plant to explore different investment options.

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How does it work?

The IDS module leverages all features of the HYDROGRID Insight platform, including ‘digital twin’ technology, to simulate investment and operational scenarios under real-life conditions. This innovative approach allows users to visualize and analyze the potential financial outcomes of various investment strategies before implementation, ensuring more informed and effective decision-making. The simulated outcome is interactive and comprehensive, allowing in-depth analysis and exploration of plant operation parameters.

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HYDROGRID created a “digital twin” of CADRE’s hydropower plant, complete with efficiency curves all static data and hydrological basin particularities.

Next, we trained our specialised inflow forecasting model, using historical data from daily operations at CADRE. This enabled us to understand the climate trends affecting the topology, and how inflows relate to production in this particular case.

Lastly, we simulated three different scenarios in three “consecutive” years: a dry year, an average year, a particulary wet year.

All in three day’s work.

Key Benefits

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Digging Deeper

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• Simulate 3 years into the future: Go beyond short-term impact  to see how a big investment will impact your bottom line in the medium- and long-term. Our simulations can give a confident estimate over longer time spans.
• Explore all operational details at hourly level: Explore how your investment will impact your operations in terms of operational and environmental constraints, efficiency curve optimisation, daily production capacities and more, all at an hourly level for all data.
• Keep access for future reference: Use HYDROGRID IDS results to document your investment, and to track actuals against the simulation during and after the project. You have access to all data in the HYDROGRID Insight platform, optimized for export in multiple formats, and neatly stored & visualized one click away - ready to be shared with any stakeholder further down the line.

Conclusion

CADRE's partnership with HYDROGRID demonstrates the potential of AI powered simulation and digitally optimized production planning in the hydropower sector. By leveraging their existing historical data, CADRE was able to take a documented decision on their hardware investments.

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