Balancing clean Water and Energy provision under changing climate and eXtremes

Project Information

B-WEX

Grant agreement ID: 101039426

DOI

10.3030/101039426

EC signature date 15 March 2022

Start date 1 January 2023

End date 31 December 2027

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 500 000,00

EU contribution

€ 1 500 000,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT UTRECHT
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - B-WEX (Balancing clean Water and Energy provision under changing climate and eXtremes)

Reporting period: 2023-01-01 to 2025-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Providing clean water and energy simultaneously to a growing global population and under a changing climate is a major challenge. The demand for the two and their systemic interdependencies are particularly strong during droughts and heatwaves. Despite the recent growth in water–energy nexus studies, there is little fundamental understanding of the cascading effects and feedbacks between water and energy systems during extreme weather events. Because existing global model approaches mainly focus on whole-system optimisation and are based on coarse spatiotemporal water and energy system representations, we lack understanding on how water–energy system processes cascade in time and space under a changing climate and extremes. Yet such understanding is urgently needed so that we can balance clean water and energy provision in our changing world in which climate shocks are increasing.

In B-WEX, we develop spatially explicit pathways that reveal how the provision of clean water and energy can be balanced under various water management and energy transition developments, including the feedbacks and cascading mechanisms under present to future droughts and heatwaves in regions worldwide.

With a team of five researchers we are building a novel global framework, which will be the first to integrate high spatiotemporal resolution models of hydrology, water quality, water use and energy systems to estimate how water and energy system processes cascade in time and space. Together with key actors, we will also develop quantitative water management and energy transition (climate action) pathways, which we will then combine with our new framework, enabling us to estimate trade-offs between water and energy systems during present to future droughts and heatwaves. The B-WEX project will greatly deepen our understanding of the cascading effects and feedbacks between clean water and energy systems development that occur under changing climate and extremes, and including climate mitigation actions.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The B-WEX project focusses on deepening our understanding of the cascading effects and feedbacks between clean water and energy systems that occur under changing climate and extremes.

Following the work package structure of the project, major achievements of the project obtained in the first two years (01/01/2023 to 31/12/2024) are:
WP1: Energy sector’s supply and water demand under drought and heatwave events
• A new open-source global hydropower plant and reservoir dataset has been developed (publication is in revision)
• A new hybrid hydropower model framework combining physically based modelling and machine learning model is under development to estimate impacts of droughts on hydropower generation (publication is in preparation for submission).
• Impacts of present and future climate change and associated changes in surface water temperature, river discharge on usable capacities of existing thermoelectric power plants globally have been quantified (publication is in preparation for submission).

WP2: Energy consumption for providing clean water and alleviating water scarcity under droughts and heatwaves
• Impacts of droughts and heatwaves on sectoral water use and surface water quality have been analyses based on analyses of monitoring and reported data, systematic literature survey and modelling in synergy with the Vidi project (funded by Dutch Research Council). Three publications on these topics have been published (Cardenas Belleza et al, 2023, ERL; Graham et al. 2024, J. of Hydrology; van Vliet et al, 2023, Nature Reviews Earth & Environment)
• Concept of integrated clean water scarcity assessment framework has been developed and published (van Vliet, 2023, Nature Water)
• Present state and future changes of clean water availability and water scarcity has been estimated with global hydrological, water use and surface water quality models. A paper on this work has been published. (Jones et al, 2024, Nature Climate Change)
• Energy consumption for providing clean water for different water treatment technologies have been quantified for present state globally. A publication on is currently in press (Magni et al, 2025, Water Research, in press)

More details on the research and technological achievements, novel methodologies, inter-disciplinary developments, linkages to publications, presentations and knowledge transfer are described in the detailed report.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

We show substantial improvements in energy (i.e. hydropower generation) and water quality predictions when using hybrid (combined process-based and machine learning) model approaches. We found that the hybrid model strongly outperforms the physical model, demonstrating improved accuracy and reliability, particularly under climate extremes such as drought and heatwaves conditions. This shows significant advancement in both the hydrology and energy research fields. It shows suitability to explore this for different energy technologies and to different water quality and hydrological variables.
We also showed a potential scientific breakthrough by highlighting that in most present and future water scarcity hotspot regions of the world, water scarcity is driven by both water quantity and quality issues.

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