China’s Booming Hydropower: Systems Modeling Challenges and Opportunities

China has been experiencing an unprecedented hydropower boom since 2000. By the end of 2015, the nation’s cumulative installed hydropower capacity was four times larger than that of the United States (Uria-Martinez et al. 2015), reaching 320 gigawatts (GW), accounting for 26% of the global hydropower capacity (IHA 2016). As a pace-setter for producing electricity from renewable energies (Observ’ER 2013), China has entered a new era of hydropower generation made possible by a series of massive projects with unique features, including the world’s largest hydropower station (Three Gorges, 22.5 GW), the largest hydro-turbine unit (800 MW), and the largest number of giant cascaded hydropower systems (10 basins having cascaded systems with capacities more than 10 GW, the largest one holding 32 GW in 2015). To add to this list, the country boasts the largest hydropower aggregation in one regional power grid (China Southern Power Grid, 100 GW in 2015), as well as the largest interprovincial hydropower transmission capacity (73.8 GW in 2015, 100 GW by 2020). Managing such a complex hydropower network is a mammoth task on the edge of engineering and sciences. This paper outlines the challenges associated with China’s large-scale hydropower system development, providing critical insights in three topical areas of hydrypower generation, transmission, and absorption. The paper also highlights areas where the long and rich history of water resources systems research and state-of-the-art modeling approaches can help address these challenges. Hydropower Generation