Repotenciação de usinas hidrelétricas utilizando perfil alternativo de máquinas hidráulicas

Abstract

The generation of clean and sustainable energy is increasingly prominent in the concerns of humanity. The optmization of the use of natural resources for this purpose, as well as for food production, water consumption, transport and other necessities is becoming a major challenge. Therefore, a generation of electric power, with hydropower resources, main source of energy installed in Brazil, is at its availability limit without reference to large power plants. The installation of micro and mini power generation projects has found, in the national electricity sector recent legislation, the possibility of connecting their generators to the distribution system through Distributed Generation, through the compensation modality of consumed and generated energy. This possibility inaugurates is a new reality for the generation of hydroelectric power as it allows the implementation of projects for small-scale water sources, which until then were relegated to generation in isolated systems. On the one hand legislation has overthrown a historic impediment to such projects, on the other it has launched the challenge of making them viable. The quantities compensation of electricity consumed by energy generated and delivered to the distribution network, with the reality of tax exemption in force, in itself is a lever in the direction of this viability. Nevertheless it is not enough. Barriers such as technical and operational complexity, allied with the high prices of acquisition, operation and maintenance of the hydroelectric generating machines available in the market are still very preventable. In this sense, this work proposes a technical alternative to collaborate in the viability of the implantation of small hydropower generation projects, as well as in the repowering of old, depreciated and generally inefficient plants, many of them abandoned across the country. This is about the proposal to use an alternative profile for hydraulic turbines, the flow generating machine instead of the turbines. The work reports the experience of repowering a former 600 kW hydroelectric plant, repowered to 3,000 kW, by replacing its equipment with flow-generating hydraulic machines (pumps) powering synchronous generators with 500 kW units.