Balancing Clean Water and Energy Consumption in the Present and the Future

The provision of clean, high quality water is accepted as one of the greatest achievements of modern public health; accounting for dramatic reductions in disease, infection, and mortality. Populations are growing and the necessity of clean water is necessary to continue these public health successes. However, this requires larger quantities of water and larger infrastructure and operations – including water treatment, distribution, and conveyance systems – necessary to meet these needs. Moreover, as populations grow, source water resources are becoming scarce, harder to extract, and of lesser quality causing more stringent and intensive treatment techniques and technologies to be used to meet sufficient water quality levels.

Expanding water infrastructure and introducing intensive water treatment technologies results in an increase of energy consumption. Consequently, many environmental and societal concerns correlate with increases in energy consumption; not the least is climate change. Climate change poses a significant challenge to future source water quality. Therefore, one must consider the temporal trade-off of providing quality water in the present versus the future. To provide the highest societal benefit one must consider an integrated development and operational paradigm by which the present energy consumption and water quality levels must be balanced and optimized against future energy consumption and water quality levels. This paper describes a thermo-economic methodology to balance and optimize present and future energy consumption and water quality levels to guide water treatment and distribution operations.