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• Hydro-Québec can provide annual storage ranging from 3 to 6 TW h for high VRE markets. • Price arbitraging with high VRE markets leads to sustainable changes for hydropower. • Hydropower maintenance flexibility will gain more value with VRE growth. • Revenues from price arbitraging with high VRE markets remain low. Northeastern North America is transitioning rapidly from fossil fuel generation to variable renewable energy (VRE) sources such as wind and solar. Their integration into electricity grids poses challenges in terms of matching supply with demand. Once VRE represent a large share of installed capacity, intermittency and variability of their production will become a major issue. Hydro-Québec, the public electric utility in the Canadian province of Québec, has a large hydropower generation fleet. Its storage capacity enables adjusting hydro production, when the system needs it, to support VRE integration. In this paper, potential impacts of VRE growth within neighbouring grids are simulated through operational production management models. The results show that Hydro-Québec has the potential to facilitate this energy transition but that the current electricity market structure does not provide incentives for an optimal contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A novel optimization model to maximize energy for short-term hydropower unit commitment is proposed. • A MILP formulation based on the efficiency curves is established. • The optimized solutions can be directly implemented in practice. • A real case study in Canada shows benefits of optimal solutions compared to historical decisions. This paper presents a linear mixed-integer formulation to solve the short-term hydropower unit commitment problem. It uses the pair of maximum efficiency points of water discharge and the power produced at the maximum storage for all possible combinations of turbines. The goal is to maximize total energy production for all periods. The objective function is calculated using the correction between the power produced at the current volume and the maximum storage and penalizes unit start-ups. Constraints on the maximum number of turbine changes are imposed to find a viable solution. Computational results are reported for 65 instances with two powerhouses of five turbines each located in the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean region of the province of Quebec in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]