FIThydro – Fishfriendly Innovative Technologies for Hydropower

Peter Rutschmann (FIThydro Coordinator) 
Hany Abo El Wafa (FIThydro Project Manager)
Technical University of Munich

Introduction
FIThydro, Fishfriendly Innovative Technologies for Hydropower, was a European Commission-funded Horizon 2020 project with 26 partners from 10 European countries and a total budget of 7.2 million Euros. The project, led by the Chair of Hydraulic Engineering at the Technical University of Munich, highlighted the important role of hydropower as a renewable, CO2 free energy in Europe. FIThydro addressed the decision support in commissioning and operating hydropower plants (HPP) by use of existing and innovative technologies. It concentrated on mitigation measures and strategies to develop cost-efficient environmental solutions and on strategies to avoid individual fish damage while enhancing population developments. Therefore, HPPs all over Europe were involved as test sites.

Figure 1: FIThydro Test case – Altusried Hydropower Plant, Germany (© Oliver_König)

The most important outcomes of the project are briefly explained below:

Decision Support System - DSS (Lead: the University of Hull, UK): The FIThydro DSS ( www.dss.fithydro.wb.bgu.tum.de/home/ui ) is a systematic, risk-based, open-access online assessment tool to guide users to environmentally (fish-)friendly hydropower production and safe fish passage, through the planning, development and operation of existing and new hydropower schemes, including the revision of permits [2].
FIThydro Wiki (Lead: Sintef Energy Research, Norway): The FIThydro Wiki ( www.fithydro.wiki/index.php/Main_Page ) is an open access online platform that provides an overview of and information on different mitigation measures in the context of fish friendly hydropower. The mitigation measures are classified according to various parameters. Each measure has a suggested procedure with recommended methods, tools and devices for different stages of implementation. The FIThydro Wiki is closely linked to the DSS [3].

Figure 2: FIThydro Wiki

European Fish Hazard Index-EFHI (Lead: The Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, Germany): The EFHI is a referenced, index-based assessment scheme for fish hazards at hydropower environments. Beyond the pure impact assessment, this index species-specifically guides the derivation and improvement of target fish populations in hydropower environments. The EFHI is the first European-wide guidance and assessment tool for ensuring more environmentally and especially fish-friendly hydropower production [4].
Cumulative Impact Assessment - CIA tool (Lead: University of Hull, UK): The CIA tool is an evidence-based guidance on the assessment of environmental impacts from multiple HPP schemes in a single river basin. The model is based on fish life history strategies and provides a GIS-based tool that can model potential basin scale impacts and support informed decision-making on siting HPP schemes and mitigation planning.
Furthermore, a set of devices and computational tools have been developed to protect individual fish and to enhance upstream and downstream migration of fish. These are:

• Curved-bar Racks - CBR (Lead: ETH Zurich, Switzerland): The CBR is a fish guidance structures which consist of vertical curved bars with an adjacent open channel bypass system. The bar spacing of the CBR is large and therefore no rack cleaning is necessary and hydraulic losses are negligible. CBR proofed in Lab tests as more efficient than fine racks. CBR addresses the fish behavior in that fish try to avoid the vortex shedding produced by it [5].
• Induced Drift Application - IDA (Lead: Technical University of Munich, Germany): The IDA is a fish protection system to reduce mortality during turbine passage by using electro stimuli just upstream of the turbine runner. It directs fishes to the turbine hub and slightly paralyzes them by electro shocks. The device requires only simple and quick installation, is cost-efficient and can be used in new and for retrofitting at existing also large-scale HPPs.
• Barotrauma Detection System - BDS (Lead: Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia):  The BDS is used in connection with fish damage in turbines and is characterised by a watertight autonomous measuring device that records pressures, velocities as well as accelerations during a turbine passage. From the recordings, the probability of fish damage in the turbine can be derived. 
• Artificial Lateral Line Probe - LLP (Lead: Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia): The LLP mimics the lateral line organ of a fish and the perception by the fish's natural sensors. With the LLP, left-right and front-rear flow field changes can be recorded and evaluated with artificial intelligence.
• 3D Sensorless Optical (Lead: ETH Zurich, Switzerland):  and Ultrasonic fish-tracking  (Lead: Technical University of Munich, Germany) systems: The optical 3D fish-tracking system has been developed for etho-hydraulic live-fish tests in the Lab. Vertically submerged cameras and a MAT- LAB-based 3D tracking software allow to determine fish locations from recorded videos. The ultrasonic tracking can be applied for 3D fish-tracking as well as adaptive and dynamic migration management of fish. It works without tagging of fish and detects fish in natural rivers with high spatial and temporal resolution over long ranges using multiple ultrasonic transmitters.
• Agend based model in CASIMIR (Lead: SJE Ecohydraulic Engineering, Germany): The well-established fish habitat model CASIMIR was enhanced during the FIThydro project with an Agent Based module. The module mimics the fish behavior during search for upstream migration at hydropower plants. It uses so-called behavioral rules, which resulted from a long-term 2D telemetry study. Some 6 million positions of the tagged fishes were recorded and analyzed.
• CFD based turbine fish mortality modelling using BioPA (Lead: Voith Hydro, Germany): BioPA is an existing fish passage modelling tool developed by PNNL in the US. In FIThydro the biological dose response for European species was collected and is now available for BioPA. Additionally, the model was extended to consider for active fish behavior during turbine passage. Consequently, fish passage hill-charts can be used to adapt turbine operation to fish migration cycles.

Current status
The FIThydro project has ended on 30 April 2021, All project objectives were successfully achieved by bringing together partners from different disciplines and enabled further developments in the field of sustainable hydropower and fish protection. The project has gathered a lot of knowledge and made it available to a wider community. In addition, new tools and innovative devices have been created and developed and are ready for use. A complete overview of the results is available at the FIThydro website https://www.fithydro.eu/ and on the EC Cordis page ( https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/727830 ).

FIThydro impact in HYPOSO countries
 FIThydro focuses on mitigating the impacts of hydropower on fish populations and ecology, while HYPOSO aims to promote hydropower as a low-cost, CO2-free and sustainable power generation in emerging economies. While the cost price of hydropower is compelling and has often led to economic growth, its environmental impacts have often been neglected in the past and seen as cost drivers. FIThydro has sought to implement sustainability in a cost-effective way, or even to achieve win-win situations to improve production and reduce environmental impacts. Thus, it was possible to demonstrate: Considering sustainable environmental protection does not necessarily have to have economic disadvantages! With FIThydro, solutions are presented that are both cost-efficient and environmentally friendly, as well as bringing macroeconomic and longer-term economic benefits, and are thus also interesting for the HYPOSO countries. Tools such as the FIThydro-DSS or the FIThydro-Wiki make it possible to optimise hydropower at given locations in this respect and to find the best solutions even in the absence of experience in ecological hydropower generation. The FIThydro project can therefore also provide important impulses in the HYPOSO countries!

The FIThydro project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020     research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 727830.