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The U.S. Department of Energy’s Guidebook for Hydropower Projects
Argonne National Laboratory, located in Lamont, Illinois.
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Hydro Leader: Please tell us about your backgrounds and how you came to be in your current positions. Dominique Bain: I started working with production cost models in graduate school at Northern Arizona University
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in 2014. I continued working with them during my time at Arizona Public Service in Phoenix. When I started at NREL about 2½ years ago, I started focusing more on hydropower representation in hydro production cost models. Greg Stark: I’m the technical lead for hydropower at NREL. My background is in power systems engineering and crosssector optimization, and I like looking at the confluence of water and power. I have a mixed background in electrical engineering, finance, and economics. Vladimir Koritarov: I’ve been with Argonne for 30 years. I’m currently the program manager for the waterpower program and the director of Argonne’s Center for Energy, Environmental, and Economic Systems Analysis. Before Argonne, I spent about 8 years working as a power system planner at the electric utility of the former Yugoslavia. I am a power systems engineer; my background is in energy systems analysis. Over the years, I’ve done a lot of capacity hydroleadermagazine.com
PHOTO COURTESY OF ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY.
he U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has funded a team of five national laboratories to develop a valuation guidance for pumped storage hydropower. The team has developed and recently published a guidebook to assist developers of prospective pumped storage hydropower projects and other stakeholders in evaluating the services these facilities can provide. Two of the five labs that contributed to this effort are Argonne National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). In this interview, Vladimir Koritarov of Argonne and Dominique Bain and Greg Stark of NREL discuss the creation of the guidebook, the case studies they carried out to test the valuation methodologies, and the importance of promoting pumped storage as a core component of a future carbon-free grid.
