Uncertainties in the risk assessment of hydropower dams: state-of-the-art and outlook
Résumé
Risk assessment of hydropower dams is a topic of great interest for countries with
extensive production facilities like Switzerland. Due to the high costs associated to
the detailed simulation of dam failure events, however, traditional approaches to
quantify the risk they pose are largely based on the statistical analysis of historical
data, or on worst-case scenario modelling. In the latter case, the design of such
scenarios is usually based on sometimes contrasting expert opinion or very sparse
available data. In addition, there exist no unique framework or set of tools to quantitatively
assess the socio-economical consequences of a dam-related flood event.
The sparsity of available data, combined with the variability of environmental
conditions (e.g. weather conditions, time of the day etc.) and lack of knowledge on
the failure process (e.g. dam failure mechanisms) create an additional layer of uncertainty
that is not yet properly dealt with in the current risk assessment workflows.
This report summarizes the state-of-the-art of risk assessment for hydropower
production dams at all levels: from the problem statement itself, to the technical
tools (theoretical and numerical) available for its solution, with a focus on life loss
estimation and on the role of uncertainty on the final analysis results.
The work for this report was conducted within the project “Risk Governance of
Deep Geothermal and Hydro Energy” of the National Research Programme “Energy
Turnaround”. It is closely coordinated with ongoing activities of the Technology Assessment
group at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in both the National Research
Program (NRP) 70 “Energy Turnaround” and the Swiss Competence Center for Energy
Research (SCCER) “Supply of Electricity” (SoE).
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
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