Determining location and capacity of dams through economic and environmental indicators

Construction of dams is a conventional way to deal with the problem of water scarcity in undeveloped basins. The economic and the environmental effects of dams are often evaluated locally rather than in a basin frame. The distinctive feature of this paper is to propose a basin-wide approach, comprised three steps for determining dams' locations and dams' capacities based on optimization modelling. Our approach provides an environmentally sound plan for surface water development that also results in the highest profit for the basin, for the sake of achieving sustainable development. The first step of our approach runs a mixed-integer linear model to give optimal locations and capacities of new dams for various number of dams along with satisfying the environmental water requirements in the entire basin. The second step uses a sensitivity analysis to finalize the number of dams in the basin by comparison of the basin profits, given by the various number of dams. Finally, the third step of the algorithm investigates the possibility of dams' capacities reduction, for the selected number of dams while they still provide the same basin profit, given from the first step, using another mixed-integer linear model. The introduced approach was applied to the Sefidrud Basin, Iran and its results showed that three dams could lead to an environmentally sound sustainable economic development for the Basin.