I am using WEAP to explore trade-offs between hydropower production, irrigated agriculture and environmental flows in an alpine catchment in Northern Italy.
I would like to represent in WEAP the following hydropower system:
1) a reservoir located in the upper part of the basin from which water is withdrawn and channelled to produce hydropower at a plant located 15km further downstream. At the plant, water is turbinatd and released back to the river. I am able to model this component of the system in WEAP by using a "diversion" immediately downstream of the reservoir so that water is released back to the river where I need it to be.
2) between the reservoir and the hydropower plant there are withdrawal points from streams that are used to augment the flow derived from the reservoir. These withdrawals feed directly to the plant and not to the reservoir. So, effectively, these withdrawals work as run-of-river plants (i.e., there is none flow regulation), but they are only operational when water is also withdrawn from the reservoir.
Is there a way in WEAP to separate the hydropower plant from the reservoir, so that I can divert streams to the plant? Or, how would you represent the system described above?
You are correct in using a diversion object to represent the off-channel portion of the flow diverted away from the river. You could use a reservoir object to represent the water storage and a run of river hydro object to represent the hydropower generation without the storage component.
Note that a reservoir object can also have hydropower if you have storage and generation in the same place.
