A Geospatial Approach for Rapid Assessment of Hydropower and Environmental Opportunities at a Basin Scale

The U.S. Department of Energy is leading an initiative to develop an approach for simultaneously assessing hydropower and environmental opportunities at the scale of a river basin to identify where complementary opportunities or potential conflicts might occur.  The approach has been piloted in the Connecticut and Roanoke river basins in the eastern United States, and will be tested in the Big Horn River basin in the western U.S. in 2014.  A geospatially-driven data model was constructed to rapidly identify direct, spatially explicit interactions between hydropower and the environment that may either preclude development or indicate a potential environmental benefit.  The model is supported by a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) database that relates hydropower opportunities and environmental issues that are spatially disparate but functionally linked.  Functional relationships are defined by the user, executed as queries, and displayed geographically.  Metadata about each interaction is also available.  A general process has been formulated for performing such analyses that includes criteria for assessing the feasibility of opportunities and identifying potential beneficial interactions.  The approach is designed to be nationally deployable, rapid to implement, and adaptable to a variety of scales or regions.