Nexus Systems Modeling and Analysis

NREL performs multisector energy and power system analyses that have embedded water, land, and other resource constraints into planning and reliability models. NREL has developed in-house models and adapted commercially available and open-source models to perform electricity system capacity expansion and production cost modeling.

NREL quantifies the life cycle footprint of energy systems and technologies with respect to their impact on water, land, energy, nutrients, and waste materials. Using rigorous techno-economic evaluations and protocols developed at NREL, researchers employ unique computational approaches to understand the full impact of energy-water-land systems and technologies.

Many types of waste are underutilized resources for potable and nonpotable water supply, fuel, nutrient recovery, wastewater treatment, and other product valorization. NREL characterizes and analyzes opportunities to transform wastes from water facilities, industrial sites, landfills, and agricultural operations into alternative products or other energy sources. Our efforts have produced detailed techno-economic analysis and national-level estimates of resource potential.

Urban environments can have separate technical needs and constraints compared to rural and suburban environments. Urbanization processes generate vulnerability and exposure, which, combined with extreme weather hazards and other external changes, can increase risks to urban infrastructure, economic prosperity, and human well-being. Urban water management has traditionally involved the “vertical” and “horizontal” provisioning and management of potable and non-potable water supply, sewage, and stormwater drainage services to customers through a network of infrastructure to provide long-term planning, construction, and maintenance to meet service needs.

To manage outcomes of various forcing factors such as population and land use changes, security and supply chain vulnerabilities, and extreme weather events, NREL pursues research to characterize and analyze opportunities, and provide tools and solutions to integrate water, land, and energy within urban infrastructure. Infrastructure operations and management can be made more efficient with monitoring, Internet-of-Things networked (and non-networked) sensors and control systems, autonomous operation, and digital twins, among other solutions.

Unpredictable, extreme weather-related events—including droughts, fire, flooding, and severe weather—are posing new risks to built infrastructure. NREL researches this topic space to assess the function and security offered by distributed infrastructure to enable and optimize access to clean water and power in isolated or remote locations and in emergency response and temporary deployment situations (e.g., natural disasters). Through the research and technological development that considers human, environmental, and economic systems, NREL investigates cost-effective energy and water infrastructure solutions to critical problems. NREL provides energy-water system risk analyses to improve stakeholder understanding of ever-changing impacts to integrated energy-water systems to ensure threats and opportunities are considered in infrastructure planning and implementation.

NREL evaluates trade-offs between energy production and water usage in residential and commercial buildings based on alternative designs, operational strategies, and innovative technologies. We also explore opportunities in emerging technologies to reduce energy needs for water resources (e.g., extraction, conveyance, storage, treatment, and distribution).

NREL scientists use advanced modeling techniques, digital twins, and high-performance computing to develop a better understanding of how to optimize desalination and water treatment system processes. This informs how to more efficiently integrate treatment and other water infrastructure components, technologies, and processes to improve nexus systems modeling and analysis.