Effects of Upstream Kishanganga Hydropower Project on Hydrological Flows and Power Generation Capacity at Athmuqam and Neelum- Jhelum HPP in Pakistan /

Abstract

To overcome the energy shortfall and to reduce dependency over expensive thermal power plant Pakistan urged to increase share of hydropower generation. Main issues for hydraulic structure development are lack of data availability and water interventions from neighboring country on western rivers. With mediation of World Bank Pakistan and India signed an agreement on sharing of water resources in 1960. But India is still constructing hydraulic structures over western rivers. Recently India has designed Kishanganga hydropower project of 330 MW on Neelum river that will divert water from Neelum to Jhelum river. In response Pakistan asked World Bank for mediation and challenged this project in court of arbitration. Court of arbitration (COA) announced its partial award in 2013 and according to this award India cannot reduce river flows below 9 m3 /s but still Pakistan has serious concerns over water diversion. Purpose of this research is to estimate the effect of Kishanganga hydropower project on diminution of flows in Neelum river and financial losses is term of loss of power generation, to national economy. To estimate the missing flows at different gauging stations artificial neural networking has been used that predicted missing flows with more than 72% value of R square. For estimation of river flows at required sites, regression technique was used by integrating the total catchment area of different site with specific flows. To estimate the catchment area of missing sites Digital Elevation Model was used on GIS that was obtained from LADSAT 8 satellite. To analyze the impact of KHEP on downstream three possible scenarios were developed under the light of decision of COA and stance of both countries over water diversion was also analyzed in this research. It was observed that the impact of KHEP on downstream is too much significant in winter season in all three scenarios and it is negligible in summer season. Financially, Pakistan may face massive loss up to 28000 million rupees per year in term of less energy production if it is compared with high speed diesel oil as energy resource.