Influence of El Nino Southern Oscillation on global hydropower production

El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) strongly influences the global climate system, affecting hydrology in many of the world's river basins. This raises the prospect of ENSO-driven variability in global and regional hydroelectric power generation. Here we study these effects by generating time series of power production for 1593 hydropower dams, which collectively represent more than half of the world's existing installed hydropower capacity. The time series are generated by forcing a detailed dam model with monthly-resolution, 20th century inflows-the model includes plant specifications, storage dynamics and realistic operating schemes, and runs irrespectively of the dam construction year. More than one third of simulated dams exhibit statistically significant annual energy production anomalies in at least one of the two ENSO phases of El Nino and La Nina. For most dams, the variability of relative anomalies in power production tends to be less than that of the forcing inflows-a consequence of dam design specifications, namely maximum turbine release rate and reservoir storage, which allows inflows to accumulate for power generation in subsequent dry years. Production is affected most prominently in Northwest United States, South America, Central America, the Iberian Peninsula, Southeast Asia and Southeast Australia. When aggregated globally, positive and negative energy production anomalies effectively cancel each other out, resulting in a weak and statistically insignificant net global anomaly for both ENSO phases.