The life cycle assessment of water infrastructures such as storage dams and reservoirs are essential for computing the useful life of the storage structure. The dam reservoirs support the welfare of human civilization and assist in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which focus on water, sanitation, and clean energy. Sedimentation from reservoirs around the world is a critical problem as it results in the reduction of the storage capacity and useful life. The paucity of reservoir elevation-discharge data for the hydro-power projects makes sediment load assessment a challenging task. The paucity of reservoir elevation-discharge data for run-of-the-river projects makes sediment load assessment a challenging task. This study aims to compute the loss of storage capacity since the time of construction of Chamera-1 hydro power project located in District Chamba of Himachal Pradesh, India. The Chamera-1 hydro power project is a run-of-the-river project on river Ravi having a reservoir capacity of 3,913 million cubic meters. The techniques used to carry out this study have been pre and post-processing of Landsat images, modeling and identifying water pixels, evaluating reservoir capacity, and compression of results with echo-sounding survey data. The Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) has been also employed to determine open water features and to improve the presence of water pixels in satellite imagery. Percentage Difference Area Index (PDAI) and Normal Difference Area Index (NDAI) techniques have been used to assess the deviation of storage area from satellite remote sensing. Results indicated that the reservoir storage capacity has reduced from 91.40 to 81.17 Mm3, showing an annual storage loss of 1.4% (2014–2022). During 2016 and 2019, annual storage loss due to sediment depositions is found to be 1.64% and 1.83%, indicating significant exceedance from the annual average worldwide rate for reservoir sedimentation of 1%. The area needs some intensive soil and water management strategies for sustainable use of the reservoir. To regain the storage capacity of the reservoirs, it would be proposed to adopt manual and or mechanical dredging with flushing for de-silting the deposited sediments. The remote sensing studies also help assess the impact on the annual power generation capacity of the project along with storage capacity.
Key Words: Lifecycle-assessment, Hydropower-Project, Sediment- load, Remote sensing