Technical and Economic Evaluation of Micro-hydropower Plant Design on Water Transmission Lines (A Case study of Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province)

The production of electricity from the pressure difference inside the water transmission lines is one of the new issues in the renewable energy fields, which is achieved by replacing pressure relief valves with micro-hydropower.  For this purpose, extensive research has been done for the technical and economic evaluation of the construction of micro-hydropower on different points of water transmission lines. The main challenge in conducted studies is that these studies cannot be generalized to other points. In other words, considering that the hydraulic parameters of the lines and their operating conditions are completely different, so each line needs feasibility and separate studies. To this end, in this paper, different stages of designing micro-hydropower from a technical and economic point of view were described; then, these steps were carried out for a real case study, that is, the Kohrang-Shahrkord water transmission line. The design of micro-hydropower in this paper was done with the cost function of the ratio of income to initial capital. The results of the designs for different scenarios showed the importance of studying the daily flow rate changes that may have been affected by climate change. Also, the results showed that by choosing the Crossflow turbine for the points with large flow rate changes, the highest value of the profit index was obtained at the cost of 1.92, which led to the production of 2742,000 kW-hr of energy per year. In similar hydraulic conditions, with the choice of Torgo turbine, the value of this index was 1.34 and the annual energy production was 2141,000 kW-hr.