Sustainable Infrastructure for Water and Energy Supply (SINEWS)
P.I.: John C. Crittenden. Co-PIs: Charles Perrings, Samuel Ariaratnem, George Karady, Ke Li and Eric Williams
Secure water and energy supply is vital to the prosperity of the nation and is a growing production and consumption. For example, power generation accounts for 47% of all water (fresh and saline) and 39% of fresh water withdrawals in year 2000. Furthermore, it takes about 2,000~3,000 kWh to pump one acre-foot of imported water to southern California and an average 652 kWh to treat the same volume of water. Globally, 7 percent of all energy is committed to water supply. Linkages also exist in the water pollution caused by power generation. The obvious interdependency between energy and water in urban environments lies in the fact that they rely on each other to satisfy the increasing demands driven by population growth. Inefficiency and unreliability in either water or energy supply results in waste of both resources. This interdependency extends to the demand side as well. In desert cities, for example, energy and water are substitutes in microclimatic cooling.
Rapid urbanization in the recent decades has put unprecedented pressure on the water and energy infrastructure. The central question addressed by SINEWS is: How can we better engineer water and power infrastructures in the context of their physical and social-economic environment to assure sustainability (thereby increasing efficiency), to reduce failures, and to satisfy the future demands, through integrated planning, technological development and demand management?
The goal will be to develop a suite of databases, model architectures and decision evaluation tools to meet three major objectives.
Resilience. Resilient design includes both infrastructural design to enhance the flexibility and adaptability of the system in the face of a given structure of exogenous and endogenous risks, and environmental design to mitigate endogenous risks. It requires the capacity to predict the range of shocks that need to be accommodated. Building on earlier research, we will examine both the supply and demand sides of water and energy, addressing both the capacity of the infrastructure to meet peak demand and the institutional and regulatory mechanisms needed to regulate demand spikes.
Sustainability. The project will address the sustainability of infrastructures both in the strict sense of the call – it will focus on energy and materials saving technologies – and in the more general sense that it will identify an infrastructure and supporting environment, together with a lifetime depreciation management strategy that will maintain the value of the public assets involved.
Interdependencies. Interdependencies between infrastructures are mediated by the physical and social environments. In hot desert cities such interdependencies include positive feedbacks between water use, energy use, and the microclimate. They are largely driven by relative prices and the return on different land uses, and potentially managed through the regulation of energy demand via the price mechanism. While some of the risks confronting infrastructures such as rainfall shocks are exogenous, the interdependence of energy and water demand means that many other risks are not. Heat island effects, for example, are endogenous.
The outcome will be: (a) a model architecture for evaluating the resilience of power and water infrastructures serving growing cities, (b) design principles for both the infrastructures and the physical environment in which they are embedded, and (c) a set of decision-support tools for the economic management of infrastructure risks over time scales which match the life span of the infrastructures. While the models will be calibrated for Phoenix, Arizona, the model architecture will be generic.