Ling Shang

By Yizi Shang, Xiaofei Li and Ling Shang

It has been over 110 years since China’s first hydropower station, Shilongba Hydropower Station, was built in 1910. With the support of advanced dam construction technology, the Chinese installed capacity keeps rising rapid growth, hitting around 356 GW nationwide by the end of 2019, and the annual electricity production exceeds 10,000 TWh. At present, China contributes to 25% of global installed hydropower capacity, ranking first in the world for 20 consecutive years since 2001 and surpassing the combined of the 4 countries ranking second to fifth. This paper reviews China’s progress in the context of global hydropower development and examines the role of technological advance in supporting China’s hydropower projects, especially dam construction technology. China is currently actively promoting the “integration of wind, solar, hydro, and coal power generation and energy storage” and building a smart grid of multi-energy complementary power generation. New technologies and new concepts are expected to continue to lead the world’s hydropower development trends.

Part of the book: Technological Innovations and Advances in Hydropower Engineering

By Ling Shang, Xiaofei Li, Haifeng Shi, Feng Kong and Ying Wang

This paper is intended to study the method of solving the economic load dispatch problem (ELDP) of hydropower plants via using memetic algorithm. Based on characteristics of economical operation of the hydropower plant, this paper proposes an improvement method of mutation operator and selection operator of memetic algorithm. Taking Three Gorges hydropower station in China as an example, the performance of memetic algorithm before and after improvement is tested separately. The test result shows that the average water consumption for simulation of the improved memetic algorithm is less than that for simulation of the standard memetic algorithm by 1.35%–16.19%. When the total load of the hydropower station is low (8GW-10GW), the water consumption for the improved memetic algorithm is less than that for the standard memetic algorithm by more than 10%. When the total load of the hydropower station is high (11GW-16GW), the water consumption for the improved memetic algorithm is less than that for the standard memetic algorithm by more than 1%. This shows that improvement of mutation operator and selection operator can improve the global and local optimization capacity of memetic algorithm a lot indeed. In addition, by comparing the optimization result of memetic algorithm with that of DP algorithm, it finds that the optimization result of improved memetic algorithm can reach the same precision of optimization result of DP algorithm. Therefore, using the improved memetic algorithm to solve the ELDP problem of large hydropower stations is practical and feasible. Since “curse of dimensionality” may occur frequently while using DP algorithm to solve the ELDP problem of large hydropower plants, as a new heuristic algorithm, memetic algorithm has obvious advantages in solving large-scale, complex, highly-dimensional and dynamic problems.

Part of the book: Technological Innovations and Advances in Hydropower Engineering