We are excited to announce the next major release of RiverWare, version 9.4. Details of the release topics and links to the full release notes are on the  . To hear and see more about these new enhancements and creative uses of the tools, come to the 2025 RiverWare   .

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At this year’s Clean Currents conference in Portland, OR CADSWES industry expert Tim Magee delivered a compelling presentation titled “System-Level Hydropower Flexibility” on October 9. Magee’s talk explored the critical role of hydropower flexibility within a growing and increasingly diverse energy grid. His presentation introduced innovative "flexibility charts" and metrics designed to assess hydropower systems at scale, a breakthrough approach that promises to reshape visual and numerical evaluations of flexibility across different reservoirs and systems. Clean Currents 2024, held from October 7–10, remains the leading event for the waterpower industry, bringing together insights and advancements that address pressing challenges in sustainable energy.

For more details, visit Clean Currents:

Abstract
The inherent flexibility of hydropower units is known to be valuable for both power producers and the larger power grid because many other power sources are less flexible, and some sources are not dispatchable. These limitations of other power sources and their growing use means that fully taking advantage of hydropower flexibility is more important than ever.
Our work with operational models that cover 1/3 of the U.S. hydropower fleet and our prior flexibility research informs our opinion that the flexibility of individual units often does not translate to system level flexibility because of other constraints at the plant and system level, often reflecting the multi-purpose use of reservoirs, mismatched hydropower plant sizes, lag times between reservoirs, and many other factors. From a power perspective, there is an important and open need to assess actual system level flexibility both visually and numerically.
We present new “flexibility charts” to visualize system-level hydropower flexibility and flexibility metrics derived from these charts. These charts and metrics provide a basis to make a variety of visual and numerical comparisons: different reservoirs, different systems, different policies, different conditions, etc. The flexibility charts generalize the concept of the average utilization factor for a hydropower plant over a period of time to a system of reservoirs, We motivate and illustrate flexibility charts with multiple plant examples. We also differentiate between theoretical, optimal, and observed flexibility charts and metrics.
 

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We are excited to announce the latest release of RiverWare and RiverSMART, version 9.3.

Highlights of the release include:

• A new Settings Manager to centralize settings, including functionality for searching and filtering to find the desired setting.
• Support for multiple Multi-Windows and improved docking functionality within the Multi-Window.
• A new MRM Data Extractor Tool that pulls data out of models saved via Multiple Run Management.
• New Multiple Statistic analysis in the Ensemble Data Tool (EDT) and the ability to create shaded percentile curves as shown in the image.
• New statistical slot options for exceedance calculations and distribution fitting.
• Improved Export Copy options for data in slots and SCTs.
• New RPL functions and operators for LIST computations.
• Improvements to the scripting interfaces and script variable options.
• A new RiverSMART Batch Mode allowing scenario simulations through a batch script.
• Many bug and issue fixes.

Please see the for more details about version 9.3.

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Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton, Deputy Commissioner David Polumbo and other officials from the Colorado River Basin (CRB) visited CADSWES on June 5 for a special celebratory luncheon and award ceremony to honor the Bureau of Reclamation team stationed at CADSWES for their contributions to the ongoing process to determine the future management of the CRB.

11 of the Reclamation employees stationed at CADSWES received a certificate of recognition from the Commissioner for their efforts and accomplishments in this important process. CADSWES Director Dr. Edie Zagona provided a brief history of the close collaboration between Reclamation and CADSWES over the past 35 years in innovating the approaches and decision support tools that have supported the government’s successes in managing the Colorado River and numerous other river basins. “Another great outcome of this collaboration has been the many graduate students who have contributed to the science during their academic experience and are now leaders at Reclamation and other organizations in the global water management community,” Zagona said.

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Professor Joseph Kasprzyk, Senior Research staff David Neumann, and Ph.D. student Madeline Pernat presented recent research and development results at the ASCE World Environmental & Water Resources (EWRI) conference May 19 – 22.  All in the Water Resources Modeling, Management and Policy sessions, and Kasprzyk and Pernat also participated in the session on Advances in Streamflow Forecasting at Hourly to Seasonal Scales Under Current Climate and/or Changing Climate.

Titles with links to the authoring information and presentation abstracts are below:

Kasprzyk and Pernat

Kasprzyk

Neumann

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Edie Zagona was part of a CU �鶹ӰԺ team for the USAID’s Improved Water Resources Management for Sustainable Economic Growth in Armenia program. She presented "Water Resources Management: Objectives, Technologies and Best Practeces" to faculty and students. More about the week long trip in May 2024 is available here   .

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A delegation of five high ranking professionals from the Nile Water Sector, Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation in Egypt visited CADSWES on May 15, during their trip to the United States for the project “Climate Change Impact on Egypt’s Water Scarcity.” The goal was to gain information on ways to negotiate challenges they are facing in their water management community. They had previously learned of uses of our RiverWare software tools and were excited for the opportunity to come to CADSWES and meet with Dr. Edith Zagona and learn more. Mitch Clement, David Neumann, and Edie Zagona gave them presentations about potential tool uses.

The US visit was organized by the Department of State and the �鶹ӰԺ Council for International Visitors (BCIV), who provided them with international liaisons/interpreters.

Delegation members:

Mr. Alaaeldin Mabrouk KOTB, Meteorologist, Nicle Forecasting Centre

Mr. Mohamed Khaled MEHANNA, Senior Engineer

Mr. Amgad Salaheldin MOHAMED, Senior Engineer

Mr. Mostafa Ahmed SAYED, Assistant Minister for Nile Water

Ms. Sara Mohamed ZOURIQ, Technical Officer

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Balaji Rajagopalan and a several colleagues analyzed Colorado River data from a suite of models. Their study accounts for both rising temperatures as well as predicted precipitation and it appears that the river’s future may be more positive than recently anticipated. Their findings were published in the Journal of Climate with the American Meteorological Society. More about the study is on the CIRES website

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PhD student Madeline Pernat received a 2024 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (GFRP) for the research she is doing on the Colorado River Basin, with advisors Joseph Kasprzyk and Edie Zagona, and the Bureau of Reclamation. See more about the award and the research here. Congratulations to Maddy!

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Tim Magee presented “Realizing Hydropower Flexibility with RiverWare“ at the CEATI Hydropower Conference March 20, 2024, in Palm Springs CA. The presentation was co-authored by Edie Zagona, also from CADSWES, and Gabe Miller from TVA was a co-presenter. The presentation was well received and shared important technology available to adapt to a changing hydropower landscape. More about the conference is .

Abstract:

Fully realizing the potential flexibility of hydropower is essential both because of the variability of load and the growing penetration of renewable generation. While renewables contribute generation, renewables also add variability to the net load after subtracting their generation. The remainder of generation portfolios, including hydropower, face an ever-increasing need for generation flexibility, and the value of that flexibility is likely to increase.

Hydropower is an innately flexible resource, but that flexibility is not always realized. We describe several approaches to realizing the hydropower flexibility. All approaches use RiverWare’s preemptive goal programming optimization method.

One approach to realizing hydropower flexibility is to reconsider standard operating practices that are not formally required but are limiting flexibility. We present the measured gain in flexibility from relaxing some of these common practices.

Another approach to realizing hydropower flexibility is to accurately represent hydropower flexibility in production cost models (PCMs) which include power demand, transmission, and other sources of generation. A complimentary part of realizing hydropower flexibility is including the data generated by PCMs as signals to drive hydropower models. Together, this bidirectional transfer of data can use hydropower flexibility to jointly optimize all generation sources for cost and reliability. We describe several approaches we have applied to real hydropower systems, including TVA, BPA, and others. We also describe the lessons learned from these approaches.

We present one approach in more detail, a case study at TVA with a novel iterative process that approximates joint optimization of hydropower with its flexibility and a portfolio of other generation within a PCM. The iteration ultimately solves both a hydropower model and a PCM twice to approximately optimize TVA’s generation portfolio. This optimization is done with the minimum possible violation of TVA’s higher priority non-power constraints on the hydropower system.

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