Abstract for: Exploring Water-Energy Nexus towards Integrated Water and Energy Management

The importance of water-energy nexus has been gradually recognized, but few efforts attempt to investigate the implications of water-energy nexus towards integrated water and energy management. The goal of this study is to examine the integrated management options for long-term regional water and energy resources management with consideration of their interactions through a system dynamics approach. An integrated model was developed by linking water and energy sub-models through the interactions between water and energy systems identified by system archetypes. The result shows that water demand is reinforced by energy demand, and vice versa. The result also reveals that some decisions to solve the problems of one resource may result in the problems of the other resource. Increase of water price is one of these. This study also demonstrate that integrated management options (e.g. reclaimed water as an alternative water supply) can improve the uses of water and energy, but decisions without considering each other (e.g. seawater desalination as an alternative water supply) may lead to more issues. This study is an initial attempt to link water and energy systems to explore integrated management options. It is limited by the data availability, assumptions for model simplification, and lack of consideration of climate change.