Integrated Water-Energy Resilience Research and Testbeds

Water availability increasingly constrains the reliability and flexibility of water-dependent energy systems, including hydropower, thermoelectric generation, and grid operations. Hydrologic extremes, shifting demand, aging infrastructure, and cross-sector pressures are intensifying stress in shared basins and limiting the performance of these systems under extreme events.

This Whitepaper concept will advance the scientific foundations needed to quantify and improve water-energy resilience. Research will integrate diverse, multi-source and multi-scale observations, advance coupled modeling approaches, establish basin-scale scientific testbeds that capture competition among energy and food-system water demands, and develop risk-aware evaluation and decision frameworks. These efforts will improve diagnosis of system behavior, better reconcile processes across scales, quantify uncertainty, and evaluate resilience under extreme events and cross-sector pressures. Collectively, this work will enable near-term (3-5 year) advances in predictive understanding and resilience assessment for water-dependent energy systems.