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Dynamic Population Mapping to Advance Energy-Water Resilience

Dynamic population mapping, combined with household-level energy and water demand profiling, enables precise, actionable forecasting and resilience planning for U.S. energy-water systems under variable population and climate conditions. Energy and water systems face growing stres...

Zimmer, A., Tuccillo, J., Jeong, B., and Urban, M.

Aligning Bytes with Basins to Promote Data Center Growth in the U.S.

This white paper examines the water-energy tradeoffs of U.S. data-center expansion, highlighting how cooling choices, power sourcing, and siting decisions shape local water security, grid resilience, and watershed sustainability. The study focuses on integrating direct (on-site po...

Siddik, M., Turner, S., and Chinthavali, S.

Thermoelectric and Hydropower Drought Monitor and Outlook: Tools for more robust resource adequacy planning and management

The primary focus is on issues related to water for energy; specifically, how drought-impacted water supply limits the generation potential of hydropower and thermoelectric assets. Existing Challenge: Twenty-two droughts, each causing a billion dollars or more in damages have im...

Voisin, N., Tidwell, V., and Gerlich, J.

Unlocking Small-scale Hydropower using Water Infrastructure for National Energy Security

Reliable local energy generation and long-duration energy storage are critical to balancing peak demands and providing distributed emergency backup near both urban and rural populations. However, small-scale (< 10 MW) hydropower faces barriers, including siting, permitting, water ...

Stokes-Draut, J., Taylor, M., and Rao, P.

Minimizing Costs and Risk for Rural Water Systems

Many rural and remote populations either lack access to treated water supplies or are served by water systems that are at risk from increasing contaminant concentrations, aging infrastructure, unreliable supplies, and/or groundwater depletion. Recent research has shown that these ...

Hendrickson, T., Rao, P., Stokes-Draut, J., Gonzalez, S., and Fiske, P.

Energy-Water System Resilience to Flooding

This white paper addresses the resilience challenges and opportunities within interdependent energy-water systems, particularly under the stress of flooding events. It describes how large-scale flood events impact these systems, posing risks such as operational constraints, infras...

McPherson, T., Giovando, J., Hou, H., Daniel, B., Bracken, C., Li, X., and Bixler, T.

AI-Enhanced Hydropower Systems: Smart Dams for a Resilient Future

This paper focuses on water-energy, using AI for smart, holistic hydropower operations to enhance water for energy resilience. The existing challenges include (a) increasing demand for water and electricity, requiring a shift to flexible, real-time hydropower operations due to ch...

Varadharajan, C., Ajami, N., Brodie, E., Ciulla, F., Falco, N., Feldman, D., Newcomer, M., Dwivedi, D., Li, Y., Nakata, R., Nakata, N., Nico, P., Williams, K., Mahoney, M., Ramakrishnan, L., and Cholia, S.

Distributed Pumped Hydro for Sustainable Energy-Water Resilience with Vertical Agriculture

This white paper focuses on water for energy and energy for water and food security. Pumped Hydro energy storage systems have been utilized for over 100 years to offer many advantages to grid management including long life, high efficiency, low maintenance, dispatchable electrici...

Bibeault, M., Sevanto, S., Hanson, D., and Akil, A.

Adaptive 3D Printed Micro-Hydropower for Resilient Grids: Digital-to-Deployment Framework

We propose to enhance the resilience of the U.S. electricity grid by enabling the rapid, adaptive, and on-demand manufacturing of site-specific micro-to-small hydropower systems for low-head dams. This approach directly addresses the nation's untapped 85,000+ non-powered dams (NPD...

Kim, P., Chawla, K., Hassen, A., Roschli, A., Post, B., Saha, S., and Mueller, R.