Solar and wind energy enhances drought resilience and groundwater sustainability

Abstract

Water scarcity brings tremendous challenges to achieving sustainable development of water resources, food, and energy security, as these sectors are often in competition, especially during drought. Overcoming these challenges requires balancing trade-offs between sectors and improving resilience to drought impacts. An under-appreciated factor in managing the water-food-energy (WFE) nexus is the increased value of solar and wind energy (SWE). Here we develop a trade-off frontier framework to quantify the water sustainability value of SWE through a case study in California. We identify development pathways that optimize the economic value of water in competition for energy and food production while ensuring sustainable use of groundwater. Our results indicate that in the long term, SWE penetration creates beneficial feedback for the WFE nexus: SWE enhances drought resilience and benefits groundwater sustainability, and in turn, maintaining groundwater at a sustainable level increases the added value of SWE to energy and food production.

Development of the Community Water Model (CWatM v1.04) – a high-resolution hydrological model for global and regional assessment of integrated water resources management

“…KGE measures the Euclidean distance from the ideal point (unity) of the Pareto front and is therefore able to provide an optimal solution which is simultaneously good for bias, flow variability, and correlation. For a discussion of the KGE objective function and its advantages over the often used Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) or the related mean squared error, see Gupta et al (2009) and Hrachowitz et al (2013).…”

Resilience Meets the Water–Energy–Food Nexus: Mapping the Research Landscape

“…Technology or innovation studies, on the contrary, are most interested in resilience as transformation (56%), e.g., Florentin (2019) and Song et al (2019). Not surprisingly, infrastructure is most often the topic of engineering resilience studies (36% of infrastructure studies adopt an engineering resilience scope), such as in the studies by He et al (2019) and Karan et al (2019). The comparison of the methodological focus with the thematic domain of resilience studies ( Figure 3C) reveals that infrastructure studies chiefly model (25%) or build (33%) resilience, e.g., Amjath-Babu et al (2019) and Haupt (2019); studies in the policy and governance domains theorize (45 and 50%, respectively), e.g., Uden et al (2018) and Karlberg et al (2015) or build resilience (40 and 38%, respectively), e.g., Mpandeli et al (2018) and Antwi-Agyei et al (2018); social capital and investment themed publications theorize about resilience (44 and 67%, respectively), e.g., Givens et al (2018); and technology focused research mainly models (38%), e.g., Johnson et al (2019) or measures resilience (19%), e.g., Schlor et al (2017).…”

“…A second opportunity lies in better understanding the place of resilience thinking in these cross-system WEF nexus dynamics. A popular yet partial means to obtain insights on resilience of crosssystem dynamics is to study synergies and tradeoffs between WEF systems (Jarvie et al, 2015;Cader et al, 2016;Deryugina and Konar, 2017;He et al, 2019). However, most of these assessments consider synergies and tradeoffs only between subsystems within the larger WEF nexus and overlook cross-system resilience linkages.…”

Skillful statistical models to predict seasonal wind speed and solar radiation in a Yangtze River estuary case study

“…Renewable energy resources, such as wind and solar power, play a crucial role in reducing the use of fossil fuels and ultimately lowering carbon dioxide emissions, mitigating anthropogenic global warming and enhancing drought resilience 1,2 . The desire to integrate renewable energy sources into energy systems exists in many regions of the world.…”