Hydrological Energy Analysis of Yangtze River Basin, China

Abstract: In this project, an Energy model from Thomson Reuters HBV-TR similar as the HBV model from Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) is used in Yangtze River Basin for energy inflow simulation. Yangtze River is the biggest river in China and the area of whole river basin is about 1.8 million square kilometers covering more than one fifth of whole China area. At the same time Yangtze River basin has huge hydro-energy at 268 000 MW in theory and 197 000 MW exploitable. Meteorological data, installed capacity data and hydropower production data of Yangtze River Basin are collected for model calibration. The project study area is divided into three subareas according to their precipitation, temperature and geological conditions. And HBV-TR model is used on each of them. The calibration results cannot be judged by normal criteria due to the difficulty of lacking data. However, by using other supplementary means, some reasonable calibration results are obtained. In study area, the peak value of energy flow appears in summer time during June to September following the same pace of precipitation. In Upper area, the average annual energy inflow is around 8—20 GWh when this number in Middle area and Lower area is 200—300 GWh and 400—850 GWh respectively.