Temporal-Spatial Control of Electric-Driven Water Facilities for Renewable Energy Management under Combinatorial Operation Modes of Contingency Response and Nexus

Using renewable energy to meet society's energy needs promises to help address concerns about climate change. However, the intermittency of renewable power, such as wind and solar power, incurs great challenges for high penetration of these renewable energies. Given that the water sector has increasing consumption of electric energy, the interactions between the power distribution systems (PDS) and water distribution systems (WDS) are becoming stronger.

This raises interest in coordinating the operations of PDS and WDS for renewable energy management (REM). However, the operation of PDS and WDS are not well coordinated because for most cases the two systems are owned and operated by different entities. This project aims at mitigating this issue by designing a comprehensive framework of PDS and WDS coordination.

The proposed framework considers the coordination of PDSs and WDSs that: 1) are owned and operated by different entities or by single entities; and 2) possess different characteristics determined by geographical and climatic features (e.g., urban versus rural, island versus desert). For the purposes of improving REM efficiency in normal operations and also the system’s resilience for contingencies, a temporal-spatial control strategy will be developed under the coordination framework that allows operators to control electricity-driven water facilities for energy storage.

This project will: 1) design a combinatorial framework for energy-water coordination in different geographical/climatic regions, with inclusion of a normal operations mode and a contingency response mode; 2) develop a temporal-spatial control scheme to implement the combinatorial coordination framework, where the first and second levels of temporal controls respond to contingencies caused by renewable power fluctuation while the third level temporal control is a spatial optimization; 3) solve the spatial optimization problem effectively under a decentralized scheme for city-scale systems and a distributed scheme for small-community systems; and 4) validate the proposed approaches on two real-world systems via computer simulations, and produce publicly accessible datasets. This research, which encompasses power, water, optimization, and control, will advance knowledge for handling coupled energy and water networks.

The outcomes of this project are targeted to improve the overall efficiency and resilience of the two critical infrastructure sectors, and may also be applicable to other critical infrastructure, such as gas and transportation systems.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.