The efficient generation of energy is the task that is becoming more and more important on a global scale in the third millennium. With the population growing at an increasing rate and with a number of emerging countries in Africa and Asia eager to establish robust industrial and residential networks of infrastructures in order to match the welfare of developed countries, the need for energy has been rising dramatically in the last decades. Moreover, answering this energy demand through the use of fossil fuels is what has exacerbated the climatic changes that had been worrying the scientific community since the last century, and which are now a reality that is becoming more apparent every day. In addition to that, the recent political crisis between Ukraine and Russia that started in 2022 has affected the economical stability of the whole Europe, as many European countries heavily relied on Russian gas for their energy production. Therefore, the developments of the last decades have made it clear that we need to rethink not only our energy production paradigm, but also how it is managed in terms of storage and use, both at utility and residential scale.Given the aforementioned context, researchers and industries have turned their attention to renewable energy sources. Of these sources, hydropower is one of the most ancient, as watermills have been used even by Romans and Greek, and for what regards the generation of electricity, it is one of the most flexible, as the generation of power can be quickly adapted to the energy demand from the grid; it has a very high energy storage capacity and hydroelectric plants have very long lifetimes, even up to