Artelys: Our solutions for maximising the value of hydropower assets
Hydropower plays a strategic role in energy transition thanks to its unique ability to provide flexibility, storage, and dispatchability to the electricity system. However, managing hydropower systems is becoming increasingly complex: hydrological uncertainty linked to climate change, market volatility, evolving grid needs, and aging assets all call for a rethink of decision-making methods.
In this context, coordination between operational and strategic decisions is becoming more demanding than ever: production planning, maintenance scheduling, flexibility monetisation, participation in electricity markets, and risk management must be considered in an increasingly integrated way to maximise the value of hydropower portfolios while preserving their long-term performance.
Drawing on several years of experience with international hydropower players, Artelys develops decision-support solutions that combine business expertise, mathematical optimisation, and risk analysis.
Optimising under uncertainty: from risk to opportunity
Managing a hydropower asset has always been a complex undertaking that involves generating at the most opportune time, either to maximise its value on the markets or to meet a production schedule set at the level of an integrated electricity system.
This complexity is evolving today. The growing integration of intermittent renewable energy is increasing the need for flexibility, and therefore the gains associated with effective hydropower asset management. In addition, the evolution of market frameworks is widening the range of monetisable services, calling for more diversified trade-offs between opportunities.
As a result, operators need to reassess the valuation strategies for their assets to identify additional revenue streams and estimate their potential in €/MWh or €/MW/year. The main pockets of value lie notably in risk pooling within diversified portfolios and multi-market intertemporal trade-offs.
Artelys supports producers in identifying and exploiting these levers:
Artelys is supporting Hydro-Québec in developing joint generation and transmission planning approaches, using hourly system simulations to make trade-offs between new wind farms, grid reinforcements and curtailment, so as to minimise overall system cost.
Artelys is also supporting the Innovation department of Compagnie Nationale du Rhône (CNR) in its thinking on how to manage its portfolio of hydro and renewable assets.
Artelys also works with CEATI on these topics. In 2025, for example, Artelys carried out a study comparing international mechanisms for compensating hydropower flexibility services and proposing ways to improve their use.
Making the most of every acre-foot of water
The constraints facing hydropower players, together with growing water stress, are reinforcing the need to get the best possible use out of every acre-foot of water.
In France, the 2021-2022 refill season recorded a 20% rainfall deficit1, while February 2023 saw 32 consecutive days without rain, a record since measurements began in 19592. In Québec, low water availability over the 2024-2026 period, combined with a particularly cold winter in 2026, forced Hydro-Québec to cut its sales outside Québec by 1.0 TWh in the first quarter of 2026 and to buy more electricity at a time when prices were high, resulting in a decline in the company’s net profit3.
Making the most of every acre-foot of water requires a detailed representation of how hydropower facilities operate. Cascading reservoirs, production functions dependent on flow rate and hydraulic head, environmental constraints, and choices of spatial and temporal resolution all make this modeling complex. The level of detail must therefore be tailored to each decision: a long-term strategic study, maintenance scheduling, and daily optimisation require different data, different levels of precision, and different computation times. The challenge is to strike the right balance between modeling fidelity, reliability of results, and execution speed.
This combination of hydropower expertise, mathematical optimisation, and software development is at the heart of what Artelys does. For example, we analysed production and maintenance-outage planning methods and tools for CEATI. This work provided operators with recommendations tailored to their assets and decision horizons, helping them better coordinate production and maintenance and limit revenue losses. The results were presented at the CEATI Hydropower Conference held in San Diego in March 2026.
This expertise is also built into the Artelys Crystal Energy Planner software, used in production by major hydropower players in North America and Africa, such as Brookfield Renewable and Compagnie Ivoirienne d’Electricité. The platform brings together, within a common framework:
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- A precise representation of hydropower assets. Numerous modules are available: reservoirs, turbines, inflows, spillways, rivers, pumps, and more. They incorporate advanced modeling features: efficiency curves as a function of flow rate and head, head/volume curves, technical limits, deviation penalties, and so on.
- Coverage of other business lines. The Artelys Crystal Energy Planner engine can jointly model hydropower, batteries, thermal generation, wind, solar, electrolysis, multi-horizon markets, contracts, and networks, while incorporating custom constraints. The goal is to give different business functions (strategic planning, dispatching, trading) a shared modeling framework.
- Workflows tailored to every planning horizon, from the medium term down to day-ahead, with hourly or sub-hourly resolution. These different planning levels interact with one another to define funnel-shaped targets, whose objective and quantitative nature streamlines communication between teams.
- Shared indicators. Production levels, flow rates and reservoir levels, energy and ancillary-service revenues, O&M costs: these KPIs give the different business functions a common basis for discussion when making trade-offs.
The goal is not just to produce an optimised schedule, but to give planning, operations, maintenance, and trading teams a shared quantitative basis for consistent decision-making and to derive lasting value from water resources.
Artelys brings its 360° view of the hydropower sector and its decision-support tools to your projects.
Feel free to contact us at info@artelys.com to discuss your challenges.
And see you at the Business Hydro trade show in October to discuss it further!
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Artelys compared the compensation mechanisms available for hydropower across global electricity markets in collaboration with CEATI
— Artelys is proud to have issued a new report published by CEATI, providing a comprehensive benchmark of compensation mechanisms available to hydropower assets across electricity markets in North America, Europe, and beyond.
