The Miño-Sil basin is located in the northwestern of the Iberian Peninsula. In the basin, there are 76 dams and 90 hydropower stations. These hydropower stations generate 3,011 MW. This amount is 83% of the total power capacity installed in Galicia and also represents 9% of total power capacity installed in the Iberian Peninsula.
Extreme weather events of precipitation are a big problem for the management of hydropower stations, population, infrastructure, energy security and energy market. The extreme weather events are amplified by climate change. Thought the Miño-Sil basin has some very large reservoirs, most of the dams in the Miño-Sil basin are flowing dams. It means that they do not have enough storage capacity for a long extreme event of precipitation.
Here we present a study of extreme weather events. For it, we take a dataset of HadCM3/HadRM3P climate model simulations. Percentiles 1%, 5%, 95% and 99% are computed for accumulated precipitation for 15, 30 and 90 days over the basin. Return periods of these extreme weather events are compared for the past century and nowdays and changes attributed to anthropogenic climate change.
We discuss how our work can be used to optimize the operations of the power plants, hydropower production and to plan future and undergoing developments of pumped-storage hydroelectricity reservoirs.