Abstract:
Hydropower development is the urgent need of the Ethiopia to mitigate the current power and
energy crisis made due to industrial and technological development in the country. The basic
things for the development of water resources in the country is the availability of accurate and
reliable information about the resources. Ethiopia is rich in water resources but, lacks the reliable
information about the hydro potential.
Water resource is the main important natural resource for the hydropower and other water based
development and needs to managed and controlled carefully.
The main objective of the study was to estimate the river discharge in Didessa sub-basin using
SWAT hydrologic model and use the calibrated and validated model to estimation of stream flow
for the development of hydropower in the sub-basin.
.
SWAT model set up was done, using readily available spatial and temporal data, after Projecting
all spatial data like DEM, land use and soil digital map data and select catchment/watershed
outlet location at the Didessa-Abay confluence.
The calibration and validation was done by SWAT-CUP SUFI2 program and the statistical pa rameters like RSR, NSE, PBIA and R2 were used for calibration and validation process.
The calibrated and validated of SWAT simulate was then used as the discharge to estimate hydro power potential. For estimation of hydropower potential, available head was extracted from the
longitudinal profile of the river by ArcGIS toolbox from the stream network using DEM data as a
surface for selected sub-basin.
The power was estimated using discharge at each selected sub-basin outlet and estimated head
from extracted longitudinal profile elevation drop. The total power was calculated by adding all
power at each sub-basin and gives 1773.5MW.
