Managing Systemic Interdependence within Energy-Water-Transportation Systems

This white paper discusses the complex interdependence between energy, water, and transportation (EWT) systems, which underpins critical infrastructure and supply chains. Failures in any of these systems can cause cascading disruptions across the others due to their tight integration, such as at dams, which serve as operational hubs for water management, energy generation, and transportation. However, the management, operations, and funding for EWT systems are fragmented across jurisdictions, agencies, and regions due to siloed development over decades. This fragmentation has led to challenges in understanding interdependencies, assessing risks, and implementing resilience strategies.

Key problems include a lack of consolidated data, limited understanding of the location and intensity of dependencies, and absence of tools or frameworks to guide integrated risk management. Additionally, there are no comprehensive databases documenting dependencies or resilience capacities, nor standardized methodologies for assessing risks or planning for cascading failures. Existing toolkits and resilience models are fragmented, lacking industry alignment and implementability. This results in difficulties in creating trade-off analyses, planning for disruptions, or developing failure mitigation strategies.

The near-term opportunity lies in addressing these gaps through activities such as characterizing interdependencies, developing standards and analytic tools, creating cross-sector management strategies, and fostering collaborations between stakeholders. Foundational steps include building a database to document system dependencies, developing resilience metrics across multiple sectors, and creating analysis frameworks that incorporate physical, spatial, and socio-economic dimensions. There is also a need for EWT interdependence models to be used in reliability and cascading failure analyses and optimization tools to evaluate trade-offs and prioritize investments.

Measures of success could include the development of comprehensive regional and national strategies, the creation of tools to assess EWT risks, the generation of reports on systems most vulnerable to cascading failures, the quantification of economic losses due to failures, and the establishment of task forces to guide interdependency management. These initiatives would enhance resilience, facilitate effective investment, and minimize risks to critical supply chains in energy, manufacturing, agriculture, and telecommunications.