Monitoring, Planning, and Management of Water Quality and Quantity for Resilient Water and Energy Systems

Both resilient systems where water is used for energy production and energy is used for treatment and operation depend not only on the quantity of water, but also quality and environmental health. Addressing gaps in environmental health and infrastructure condition/capability data will advance modeling, planning, management, and coordination at the intersection of the water and energy sectors.

Challenges such as increasing and excessive growth of algae and aquatic vegetation, the presence of pathogens or toxins can be a common occurrence. In several cases, these events have threatened or caused significant disruptions and impacted public health throughout the US. Existing monitoring techniques often fail to identify risks and treatment/conveyance infrastructure and to provide clean water for critical energy production, irrigation, or water supply.

Near-term opportunities to address the data and capability gaps that contribute to system failures or reactive responses include: 1) Identify areas with poor data coverage for near-real-time information about surface water supply systems and environmental health, 2) Document redundancies, mitigation capabilities, and flexibility in infrastructure operations and 3) Develop workflows to analyze information that crosses physical and management boundaries relevant to water-energy systems. These opportunities should lead to new data products such as synthesized reports of coverage and geospatial datasets describing multi-purpose system components (e.g., users, sources, quality constraints, etc.) as well as workflows that help connect and translate information across boundaries and data owners.

Success of these efforts would be assessed based on (1) the numbers of components that can be documented and (2) implementation of new approaches and connections within test cases. Ultimately, the positive impact of data and workflow improvements can be quantified in terms of reductions in system failures and losses as well as improved public health outcomes.