Conjunctive optimal design of water and power networks

Abstract

Abstract Water distribution systems (WDS) and power grids (PG) are critical infrastructure systems that are vital to all human activity. As such, their quality of service is of great importance for economic, environmental, and human welfare reasons. Although traditionally being analyzed separately, the two systems are interconnected and can mutually affect one another. WDSs are among the largest energy consumers in PGs, with 7–8% of the world’s total generated energy used for drinking water production and distribution (Sharif et al. 2019). At the same time, WDS storage facilities allow regulating power loads by load shifting operation policies and even storing energy by using turbines. Therefore, decisions made as part of operating one system influence the operation policy of the other. In order to utilize the potential benefits that the two systems can produce for each other, their design and operation should be analyzed conjunctively. In this paper, a conjunctive optimal design approach for water and power networks is presented, with the objective of finding the dimensions of the systems' facilities that will result in minimal overall costs, for both design and operation. The model is formulated and implemented on two example applications using an off-the-shelf nonlinear solver by MATLAB and compared to the optimal design of the independent WDS. A sensitivity analysis is performed to provide validity to the obtained results.