A risk assessment framework of seawater pumped hydro storage project in China under three typical public-private partnership management modes

Abstract Along with the rapid development of pumped hybrid storage in China, the shortage of inland resources has become a serious problem that restricts its further development. Fortunately, seawater pumped hybrid storage (S-PHS) processes the advantages in saving cost of lower reservoir construction and making full use of coastal resources, which has attracted great attention in China. In view of the characteristics of expanding sources of infrastructure investment funds and improving financial stability of both public and private sectors, varied public-private partnership (PPP) modes are introduced to promote the construction of S-PHS power plant. However, due to lack of experience, high investment, long payback period, and so forth, S-PHS project still holds great uncertain risks in the aspects of economy, environment, technology, etc. Therefore, this paper will study on the risk assessment of S-PHS project under three typical PPP management modes by linguistic hesitant fuzzy sets based cloud model. Result shows that the risk level of S-PHS project locates between “Middle High” and “High”, and PPP-S-PHS processes relatively low risk degree, of which the BOT-S-PHS is the lowest. Moreover, corresponding risk response measures for PPP-S-PHS project are proposed for helping risk prevention and further smooth implementation of PPP-S-PHS project in China.