Water-energy nexus: Impact on electrical energy conversion and mitigation by smart water resources management

Abstract The water-energy nexus refers to the water used to generate electricity and to the electric energy used to collect, clean, move, store, and dispose of water. Water is used in all stages of electric energy conversion making power systems vulnerable to water scarcity and warming. In particular, a water flow decrease and temperature increase in rivers can significantly limit the generation of electricity. This paper investigates the issues to energy conversion stemming from the water-energy nexus and mitigates them by developing a model for the smart utilization of water resources. The objective is to minimize power curtailments caused by a river water flow decrease and a temperature increase. The developed water-energy nexus model integrates the operational characteristics of hydro power plants, the environmental conditions, the river water temperature prediction and thermal load release in river bodies. The application to a hydraulic cascade of hydro and a thermal power plants under drought conditions shows that smart water management entails a significant reduction of power curtailments. In general, the full coordination of the power outputs of the units affected by the hydrological link provides the most effective mitigations of the potential issues stemming from the water-energy nexus. Finally, critical temperature and flow regimes are identified which severely impact the energy conversion and may cause systemic risks in case the generators in one region must be simultaneously curtailed.

[1]  Kalyanmoy Deb,et al.  Multi-objective optimization using evolutionary algorithms , 2001, Wiley-Interscience series in systems and optimization.

[2]  Keywan Riahi,et al.  Power-generation system vulnerability and adaptation to changes in climate and water resources , 2016 .

[3]  J. Fisher,et al.  Is there a water-energy nexus in electricity generation? Long-term scenarios for the western United States , 2013 .

[4]  Thomas J. Feeley,et al.  Electric Utilities and Water: Emerging Issues and R&D Needs , 2003 .

[5]  Heinz G. Stefan,et al.  STREAM TEMPERATURE ESTIMATION FROM AIR TEMPERATURE , 1993 .

[6]  Marko Cepin,et al.  A multi-objective optimization based solution for the combined economic-environmental power dispatch problem , 2013, Eng. Appl. Artif. Intell..

[7]  Scott Samuelsen,et al.  Quantifying climate change impacts on hydropower generation and implications on electric grid greenhouse gas emissions and operation , 2016 .

[8]  Igor Pioro,et al.  Nuclear Power as a Basis for Future Electricity Generation , 2015 .

[9]  D. Caissie.  The thermal regime of rivers : a review , 2006 .

[10]  Li Mo,et al.  Short-term hydro-thermal-wind complementary scheduling considering uncertainty of wind power using an enhanced multi-objective bee colony optimization algorithm , 2016 .

[11]  Pavel Kabat,et al.  Global river temperatures and sensitivity to atmospheric warming and changes in river flow , 2011 .

[12]  Yu Wang,et al.  China energy-water nexus: Assessing the water-saving synergy effects of energy-saving policies during the eleventh Five-year Plan , 2014 .

[13]  L. B. Leopold,et al.  The hydraulic geometry of stream channels and some physiographic implications , 1953 .

[14]  Taotao Qian,et al.  Changes in Continental Freshwater Discharge from 1948 to 2004 , 2009 .

[15]  Heinz G. Stefan,et al.  Stream temperature dynamics: Measurements and modeling , 1993 .

[16]  Balaji Rajagopalan,et al.  Forecasting river temperatures in real time using a stochastic dynamics approach , 2013 .

[17]  Y. Zhang,et al.  SPATIAL AND SEASONAL VARIABILITY IN THE COMPONENTS OF THE RIVER HEAT BUDGET , 1997 .

[18]  John S. Gulliver,et al.  In-stream flow impact on river water temperatures , 2000 .

[19]  Yanbin Yuan,et al.  An extended NSGA-III for solution multi-objective hydro-thermal-wind scheduling considering wind power cost , 2015 .

[20]  S. Vögele,et al.  Trends in water demand and water availability for power plants—scenario analyses for the German capital Berlin , 2012, Climatic Change.

[21]  Kelly T. Sanders,et al.  Critical review: Uncharted waters? The future of the electricity-water nexus. , 2015, Environmental science & technology.

[22]  F. Ludwig,et al.  Vulnerability of US and European electricity supply to climate change , 2012 .

[23]  Amro M. Farid,et al.  A Reference System Architecture for the Energy–Water Nexus , 2016, IEEE Systems Journal.

[24]  C. Copeland,et al.  Review of cold water pollution in the Murray–Darling Basin and the impacts on fish communities , 2014 .

[25]  Jimmie L. Thomas,et al.  Water Pollution Control Act , 1978 .

[26]  Nicola Ferri,et al.  Quality of surface fresh waters needing protection or improvement in order to be support fish life: 12 years of monitoring pursuant to European Union Directive 78/659/EEC. , 2011, Veterinaria italiana.

[27]  Mysore G. Satish,et al.  Predicting water temperatures using a deterministic model : Application on Miramichi River catchments (New Brunswick, Canada) , 2007 .

[28]  Yanbin Yuan,et al.  An efficient chaos embedded hybrid approach for hydro-thermal unit commitment problem , 2015 .

[29]  Hirofumi Hashimoto,et al.  River Temperature Forecasting: A Coupled-Modeling Framework for Management of River Habitat , 2012, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing.

[30]  S. Demuth,et al.  Streamflow trends in Europe: evidence from a dataset of near-natural catchments , 2010 .

[31]  George W. Brown,et al.  Predicting Temperatures of Small Streams , 1969 .

[32]  Dennis P. Lettenmaier,et al.  Global river discharge and water temperature under climate change , 2013 .

[33]  A. V. Vecchia,et al.  Global pattern of trends in streamflow and water availability in a changing climate , 2005, Nature.

[34]  Malabika Basu,et al.  Economic environmental dispatch of hydrothermal power system , 2010 .