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Abstract This work analyzes the impacts of climate change in the revenues of hydropower plants. One important input for designing and evaluating investment opportunities in hydropower is the water inflows historical data. Unfortunately, the use of such information alone may not project well the future power generation due to the influence of climate change in the water inflow patterns. This paper introduces spatio-temporal information of the future climate into the operational planning of the Brazilian hydropower system. Global climate models from IPCC are considered along with downscaled regional climate models. Our results at the individual hydro plant level show the importance of taking into account climate change information when performing hydro generation planning studies. Highlights • We present a new framework to evaluate climate change impacts in hydropower plants. • An interaction among regional climate, water inflows modeling, and optimization dispatch models is showed. • Relevant results for distinct configurations of the Brazilian system are presented. • This paper can help to support decision-making regarding investments in new hydro plants. • This multidisciplinary research provides guidance for future planning of the generation system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The firm energy rights of a hydro plant is a parameter used in some electricity markets to define the maximum amount of energy that a power plant can trade through contracts. In a centralized dispatch scheme, the coordinated operation of the hydro plants generates a synergetic gain in the system firm energy, in this setting, a question that often arises is how to fairly allocate this energy among each hydro plant. This work proposes a formulation to compute the firm energy rights of hydro plants using cooperative game theory and the last addition allocation method. The main goal is to integrate the interests of hydro agents with the needs of the regulatory agencies, searching in the core of the game for solutions that give the right incentives to the optimal system development. In order to make simulations of real instances possible, it is proposed a reformulation of the traditional mixed integer linear programming model that computes the core constraints, which induces a significant speed-up of the algorithm solution time. It is shown an application of the proposed methodology to a real instance representing the Brazilian electric power system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]