Project Overview
Societal and technical challenges
Transition to net-zero power generation is necessary but necessitates flexible demand. How can that be achieved by the water sector without compromising its own net zero plans, nor the need to sustain a safe and affordable water supply?
The project identified three research challenges:
(C1) How can we represent the variability of weather-dependent inputs (wind, solar irradiation, rainfall) and their consequences in coupled water-energy systems? Weather evolves at fine timescales (e.g., hourly) and low precipitations can threaten water supply over a few years. Representing how these timescales interact, while including the national power grid, is a challenge that has yet to be tackled by academic research.
(C2) How can we identify decision-relevant scenarios across the full range of uncertainty created by climate change, population growth and the energy transition? Scenario for water planning so far include only climate impacts on water supply, and assumed impacts of population growth on demand.
(C3) How can we integrate the transition to a low-carbon grid into strategic water resource planning? Considering new scenarios, new design options, and new operational strategies for water infrastructure, all lead to additional complexity.
Research objectives
Objectives are meant to address if of the three challenges identified above, and map into the project's three work packages (WP) represented in the diagram below. In order, these objectives are:
To implement a fast hourly water-energy system simulator including the national electricity grid, both to assess energy transition impacts on water systems and measure first-order benefits of using the built-in flexibility of water systems to manage energy demand.
To use the coupled simulator to explore potential climate-energy-population futures and identify decision-relevant scenarios for water planning that integrate energy transition scenarios for the first time.
To expand and apply decision-making under deep uncertainty (DMDU) frameworks to strategic water resource planning under deep decarbonisation scenarios. This project will achieve that, first on a single piece of water-energy infrastructure (e.g., desalination plant connected both to local renewable energy and to the grid), then at the scale of a regional water system supplying several million users in the East of England.
How do we go about it?
We are currently developing a fast hourly water-energy system simulator to simulate hourly grid prices in a variety of climate and energy transition scenarios. Coupling with a water system model will then help.
Watch this space! We will link to project data and code on this site when it becomes available.
