HydroSource: A National Water-Energy digital platform for Hydropower Data Accessibility and Use

Abstract:

Understanding the existing hydropower fleet and potential hydropower resources for the United States is critical to the stakeholders and research community supported by the DOE-EERE Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO). Therefore, the Department of Energy (DOE) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) made significant efforts toward improving the availability of hydropower information by creating HydroSource. HydroSource is a comprehensive and unique National Water-Energy digital platform that accomplishes data stewardship and dissemination for U.S. hydropower stakeholders. The HydroSource digital platform consists of hydropower related datasets, data model, visualizations and analytics tools that supports and enables hydropower research and development on topics of national interest such as U.S. hydropower market acceleration, deployment, resources assessment and characterization, environmental impact reduction, technology-to-market activities, and climate change impact assessment. HydroSource is used by hydropower operators and developers, government (federal agencies, resource agencies, and decision-makers at federal, state and local jurisdictions), nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), academia, policy leaders, and the public to inform policy decisions, increase transparency in hydropower projects and information, support science-based analysis, enable robust research, consider new project development, develop new tools for data-driven environmental assessment, and inform strategic environmental permitting and mitigation. This presentation will provide an overview of the HydroSource digital platform.