Green Hydropower Indicator System And Assessment Of Preliminary Studies

Hydropower is an important renewable energy resource. According to our country's energy structure, flood safety as well as socio-economic development status and its trends, hydropower resources will continue to be exploited in the future. However, the construction and operation of hydropower projects have imposed some negative impacts on the river's ecological environment to some extent. So it is necessary to take effective measures to control and manage the adverse ecological impacts caused by hydropower projects. Researches on the index system and assessment method of green hydropower can improve the technical standards of ecological protection during hydropower exploitment, and provide specific technical basis for the planning, design, construction and operation management of hydropower. Then it will promote a balanced development between China's hydropower exploitation and the ecological environment protection.This paper made the preliminary study on the green hydropower assessment indicators, standards and methods, combining theory with practice. A green hydropower evaluation index system, which consisted of the overall target layer, the sub-target layer, the criteria layer and the indicators layer, was built based on the synthesization of evaluation methods and research results at home and abroad. The overall target layer was a summary of green hydropower, used to reflect the overall level of ecological environment impacts of hydropower projects. Sub-target layer reflected the extent and character of impacts from different aspects, including the hydrological characteristics, water quality, riverine morphology, connectivity of river systems, biotopes, biological communities and landscape. After analyzing the main contents of sub-target layer, the corresponding criteria layer was established. The indicator layer was composed of 11 quantitative or qualitative indicators.The evaluation criteria was divided into five grades, i.e. " excellent, good, medium, relatively poor and poor ". Based on national standards, industry standards, regional standards and relative research results, the evaluation criteria for determining different indicators in qualitative or quantitative way was built up. According to complicated facts that green hydropower index system involves many indicators, AHP-fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method, wildly used in the complex assessment of the multi-indicator, multi-layer, was chosen to conduct the evaluation of green hydropower.Taking the Manwan Hydropower Station in Yunnan Province as an example, the evaluation theory and method was applied to test their efficiency. The fuzzy comprehensive evaluation result, i.e., FCI, of the Manwan Station is 2.93, indicating that the river ecosystem status is changing from good to moderate under the impact of the hydropower station. Within the evaluation, the overall results are greatly influenced by lower levels of the river morphology, river connectivity and biome.This study is only a preliminary study, and more comprehensive and in-depth research work is needed for the establishment of a broadly applicable technical standard of green hydropower. This standard should focus on the scientific and effective indicators and criteria to improve its applicability. Further investigation is needed on the evaluation method to provide a more operable assessment method for operational managers, which takes the characteristics and demand of management into consideration.