The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO) is releasing a request for information (RFI) to gain strategic and technical feedback on both the foundational framing materials for the long-term Hydropower Program R&D strategy and the detailed research roadmap for the new HydroWIRES initiative.

Over the last year, WPTO has developed foundational framing materials that could underpin a long-term research strategy for its Hydropower R&D Program. In April 2019 WPTO launched HydroWIRES (Hydropower and Water Innovation for a Resilient Electricity System), an initiative to better understand, enable, and improve hydropower and pumped storage hydropower’s (PSH) contributions to the reliability, resilience, and integration in the U.S. electricity system. The unique characteristics of hydropower, including PSH, make it well-suited to provide a range of storage, generation flexibility, and other grid services and support the cost-effective integration of variable renewable resources while ensuring reliability and resilience in a rapidly evolving system. As part of the development of this new initiative, WPTO’s Hydropower Program drafted a public-facing HydroWIRES Research Roadmap, which is now ready for public comment and feedback.

With this RFI, WPTO solicits feedback from stakeholders across the hydropower community and other relevant sectors on WPTO’s framing of issues and its potential, appropriate government role in addressing them, so that the DOE hydropower strategy and HydroWIRES research can be most impactful for the nation. WPTO anticipates releasing additional RFIs in the future to seek public comment on detailed research roadmaps for other areas of the Hydropower Program.