Grid Integration: Hydropower's Role in the Next-Generation Grid

NREL's hydropower researchers perform cutting-edge research in multiple aspects of grid integration research, including hydropower's role in grid planning, operations modeling, reliability and resilience research, and how hydropower connects to other sectors.

NREL is the only national laboratory able to perform interconnectionwide grid operations modeling and analysis at nodal resolution and dispatch timescales—an important capability for understanding the full value of both hydropower and pumped storage hydropower. This expertise is leveraged from our previous successes with wind and solar integration research and applied to the hydropower industry.