Planning South America's energy transition: Hydropower inflows and synthetic hydropower cascades

To meet climate goals, energy systems must transition to renewable sources. While for the developed world there are numerous studies on energy transitions, understanding South America as an interconnected continent has only be scarcely addressed. This work focuses on understanding the role of hydropower in South Americas energy transition. We provide a review and systematization of the hydropower inflow data and assess how variations of the hydrological year (dry, normal, wet) and of the hydropower parks resolution (aggregated representation into equivalent cascades) impact the investment decisions for Latin America's energy transition. The review of hydropower inflow data reveals that data in South America is scarce, nonetheless, one working database was found and improved by computing different hydrological years. Furthermore, simplifying the full hydropower park into equivalent hydropower cascades allows achieving a significant gain in computing time with little error in the final investment recommendations for the energy transition.