ABSTRACT

During the last decade, a transition in the water and energy supply paradigm has emerged in many places across the nation and the world. Increasing efforts have been made to integrate decentralized and alternative water and energy systems, such as rainwater collection, greywater recycling, and solar energy systems, into the existing centralized networks (i.e. electrical grid, municipal water supply system). While such integrations could potentially increase the resilience of our water and energy supplies to natural and man-made security threats, decentralized systems often lack economies of scale and hence could present increased environmental and socioeconomic costs depending on technologies and geographic locations. Without careful planning and design of such integrations and enough adoption, they could cause unintended consequences such as over-production, conflicts in resource acquisition, and an overall greater use of resources. Planning and design involves great complexities at multiple scales from individual preferences/choices to water energy systems nexus. This project applies expertise in the areas of computer science/computational sustainability, economics, infrastructure systems analysis, and life cycle assessment in a manner that develops new knowledge of these complexities in an area of critical national need. The work informs decision makers about possible outcomes and tradeoffs in different decentralized water and energy adoption scenarios. The project facilitates the planning and design of decentralized systems, and informs policy development to create more sustainable (lower environmental impacts) and resilient (able to recover from disruption) infrastructure systems for urban communities.

This project aims to develop understanding and knowledge of complexities behind the integration of centralized and decentralized water and energy systems under future demographic, climate, and technology scenarios in pursuit of resilience and sustainability. This research uses survey instruments to characterize individual preferences (utility functions) related to (de)centralization of water and energy infrastructure systems; a crowdsourcing platform for time-effective stakeholder engagement and response collection; a spatial agent-based model to develop spatially explicit adoption trajectories and patterns in accordance with utility functions and characteristics of the major metropolitan case study locations; a system dynamics model that considers interactions among infrastructure systems, characterizes measures of resilience and sustainability, and feeds these back to the agent based model; and a cross-scale spatial optimization model to understand and characterize the possible best-case outcomes and to inform design of policies and incentive/disincentive programs. Combined, these methods provide a robust capacity to consider the ways in which future development of energy and water resources can be more or less resilient, have fewer or greater environmental consequences, meet differential demands of human populations, and result in greater or lesser overall resource use. Boston and Atlanta are the testbeds for the modeling framework developed through this project.

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