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A Smart Water Grid for Micro-trading Rainwater
Abstract
Urban water management must address challenges with water shortages across the globe, due to limited resources, development of urban demands, and climate change. Novel water markets and water supply paradigms have emerged, including fit-for-purpose water reuse that delivers water treated to certain quality standards for appropriate end uses and on-site rainwater harvesting to meet non-potable household demands. In this study, we propose a peer-to-peer non-potable water market that allows households to capture, use, sell, and buy rainwater within a network of water users. This framework proposes that a peer-to-peer non-potable water market can be enabled by existing and emerging technologies, as follows. First, households need cisterns or tanks to collect and store rainwater from rooftop runoff. Second, a community pipe network is needed to serve as the backbone for the water trading network by receiving water from rainwater harvesting tanks and distributing water at households. The dual reticulation system should be dedicated to circulating non-potable water and augmented by a base flow of reclaimed water. Third, Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is needed to sense and record water contributed to and withdrawn from the water network at each household on sub-hourly time steps, and, fourth, blockchain technologies will be needed to create a ledger to record transactions between peers. This manuscript describes the water infrastructure components that enable a peer-to-peer non-potable water market and explores the hydraulic feasibility of a micro-trading system. An all-pipe hydraulic model is constructed for a hypothetical community to simulate the storage dynamics in household-level tanks, demands exerted for non-potable uses at households, and hydraulics in the dual reticulation network. Simulations explore how micro-trading may affect nodal pressures, flows in the network, and energy consumption. Results explore the tradeoffs between energy and water savings.
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Smart metering and data analytics enable the implementation of a range of onsite infrastructures for energy, water and waste management to demonstrate the interconnected infrastructure of future smart cities. A smart city funded project in Western Australia is integrating smart metering technology, household participation and data analytics. Better understanding of hybrid water systems at residential scale, as socially accepted solutions to promote water efficiency and economic savings, within the traditional centralised urban water network is achieved. An integrated water model and a system of water credits and debits is developed and tested on a case study for which 10-minute logged water consumption data of its hybrid water system are available for one year. The model is shown to provide a full characterization of the relationship between the household and the water resources, thus assisting with an improved urban water management which promotes the rollout of decentralized hybrid water systems whilst accounting for the impacts on the aquifer as an ecosystem service provider.
Using treated wastewater effluent (reclaimed water) for beneficial purposes can be a sustainable practice that reduces demand on potable networks. However, implementing reclaimed water networks can have unintended effects, specifically unintended increases in energy consumption. This case study employs multiperiod scenario analysis to examine energy consumption associated with the potable and reclaimed water systems for the Town of Cary, North Carolina. Using hydraulic planning models of both systems provided by the design engineers, the conveyance and additional treatment energy is tabulated. This method considers uncertainty in reclaimed water demand by varying the expected demand for each build out of the reclaimed water network. Differential electricity consumption is calculated as the difference between the electricity consumed to deliver reclaimed water through a secondary network compared to the electricity consumed to deliver the same volume through the potable water network. Demand uncertainty, in conjunction with spatial growth, is found to have large impacts on differential electricity consumption. Because of the high quality of wastewater effluent, no additional energy is required for treatment, causing the reclaimed water network to consume less energy than the business-as-usual scenario, where the demands are supplied via the potable network. The differential electricity consumption decreases with network expansion because the reclaimed water system becomes less energy efficient per unit volume with increasing flow rate, while the potable water system energy efficiency remains fairly constant. Understanding the trade-offs between water and energy when planning reclaimed water networks is important for sustainable resource management within the built environment.
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