Insight-Based Approach for the Design of Integrated Local Food-Energy-Water Systems

Abstract

Society currently relies heavily on centralized production and large scale distribution infrastructures to meet growing demands for goods and services, which causes socioeconomic and environmental issues, particularly unsustainable resource supply. Considering local production systems as a more sustainable alternative, this paper presents an insight-based approach to the integrated design of local systems providing food, energy, and water to meet local demands. The approach offers a new hierarchical and iterative decision and analysis procedure incorporating design principles and ability to examine design decisions, in both synthesis of individual yet interconnected subsystems and integrated design of resource reuse across the entire system. The approach was applied to a case study on design of food-energy-water system for a locale in the U.K.; resulting in a design which significantly reduced resource consumption compared to importing goods from centralized production. The design process produced insights into the impact of one decision on other parts of the problem, either within or across different subsystems. The result was also compared to the mathematical programming approach for whole system optimization from previous work. It was demonstrated that the new approach could produce a comparable design while offering more valuable insights for decision makers.

Coupling and Coordination Degrees of the Core Water–Energy–Food Nexus in China

“…Beyond that, research on the WEF nexus usually focuses on the relationship among the WEF system and other systems [28,29,30]. However, the core WEF nexus has not gotten enough attention yet [26,31,32,33]. Only with a clear understanding of the essential connection between the three resources can the nexus approach be better applied to broader areas, such as water allocation, life cycle assessment, carbon footprint, water footprint, and supply chain management [34].…”

A Nexus Approach for Sustainable Urban Energy-Water-Waste Systems Planning and Operation

“…7 To support investments and operational decisions for sustainable infrastructure systems development in cities, systems modelling approaches can be deployed taking into account energy-water-waste cross-sectoral integration, spatial-temporal resource flows and allocation, long-term socio-economic and environmental targets as well as technical constraints from a whole systems perspective. [8][9][10] Our thorough literature review shows that previous research has been conducted in the energy supplydemand optimization and system analysis under a developing country context, e.g., energy system planning and forecasting, remote-area distributed renewable energy, bioenergy research optimization and waste-to-energy systems. [11][12][13] Applications in support of the energy-water-food nexus planning has become a central focus in the current research agenda of developing systematic modelling tools.…”

Towards Fossil Free Cities—A Supermarket, Greenhouse & Dwelling Integrated Energy System as an Alternative to District Heating: Amsterdam Case Study

“…This study offers a first insight on the capacity and impact of a rooftop greenhouse solar collector for a specific case study and can serve as a stepping stone towards urban upscaling, systematization and a more detailed assessment. Even though this study is limited to the appraisal of energy, it points towards a neighborhood-level integrative design and holistic evaluation of all relevant resources, adding to the research gap surrounding the food, energy and water nexus (FEW nexus) that is currently prevailing at the regional, national or global level, as discussed in [47][48][49][50][51]. It will be at the local scale where policies and strategies turn into physical interventions and where policy makers can combine public, private and civic interventions in order to counter climate change with a larger fist [52].…”