  As the power system continues to be flooded with intermittent resources, it
becomes more important to accurately assess the role of hydro and its impact on
the power grid. While hydropower generation has been studied for decades,
dependency of power generation on water availability and constraints in hydro
operation are not well represented in power system models used in the planning
and operation of large-scale interconnection studies. There are still multiple
modeling gaps that need to be addressed; if not, they can lead to inaccurate
operation and planning reliability studies, and consequently to unintentional
load shedding or even blackouts. As a result, it is very important that
hydropower is represented correctly in both steady-state and dynamic power
system studies. In this paper, we discuss the development and use of the
Hydrological Dispatch and Analysis Tool (Hy-DAT) as an interactive graphical
user interface, that uses a novel methodology to address the hydropower
modeling gaps like water availability and interdependency using a database and
algorithms to generate accurate representative models for power system
simulation.
