Accuracy assessment of hydro power plants models

In the paper, the issue of cascade hydro system scheduling is addressed. Various techniques for hydro power plants modeling are discussed and a detailed comparison of various models is given. First, a detailed simulation model of a generic hydro power plant is presented. Although computationally very demanding, it produces perfectly accurate results. Therefore it can be used as a reference. To describe the operation of a hydro power plant, relation between the power generation and water discharge has to be known. The traditional approach to finding this relation is to utilize a polynomial function. To obtain better performance, new models based on neural networks are developed. The developed models are tested for a cascade hydro system on the Soca river and some results are reported.