Decentralized Micro Water-Energy Co-Optimization for Small Communities

TL;DR

This paper introduces a decentralized co-optimization model for small community water-energy systems, utilizing an enhanced ADMM method to optimize resource supply while maintaining sector privacy.

Contribution

It presents a novel OB-ADMM algorithm for decentralized water-energy co-optimization that preserves privacy and sector ownership in micro water-energy nexus systems.

Findings

Effective decentralized optimization achieved

Preserves privacy of water and energy providers

Improves resource management efficiency

Abstract

The water-energy nexus encompasses the interdependencies between water and energy resources identifying the existing links between the production and distribution of these resources. Therefore, understanding the water-energy nexus is crucial for developing sustainable and integrated resource management approaches. This paper proposes a decentralized co-optimization model for a micro water-energy nexus system (MWEN), aiming to optimize the combined supply of both resources to end consumers. The approach respects the separate ownership and management of the water and energy sectors while bridging the gap between their optimized operations. An enhanced version of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is proposed, the objective-based ADMM (OB-ADMM), which is able to robustly optimize each system independently towards a common objective, only sharing information about the power consumption of water management, providing privacy for each resource provider.