• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2016.05a
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• pp.190-190
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• 2016

The Water, Energy, and Food (WEF) nexus is an emerging concept for sustainable resources planning and management. The three valuable resources are inevitably interconnected, that is, it takes water to produce energy; it takes energy to extract, treat, and distribute water; and both water and energy are required to produce food. Although it is challenging to fully understand the complicated interdependency, a few studies have been devoted to interpret the concept and develop the assessment tools. The tools were mainly developed for nation-wide simulations without considering inter-basin or inter-state resources trade. This study tries to present an idea to develop and implement the WEF nexus simulation model in regional scale by advancing the existing nation-wide model with additional capability to simulate the inter-basin trade. This simulation could help local planners and engineers to determine optimal policies and infrastructure solutions to reach and ensure local demand satisfaction. The simulation model is implemented in hypothetical areas with different conditions of WEF demands and supplies. Although the inter-basin trade scenarios are simulated manually, it shows that the inter-basin resources trade could enhance the resources security for a longer time period. In future, an optimization model might be developed to provide the automatic calculation to reach optimum amount of WEF for the trade, which can be a helpful tool in decision making process.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2018.05a
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• pp.153-153
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• 2018

Water-Energy-Food (WEF) nexus is a new holistic resources management concept that considers the interconnections among resources for sustainable resources planning and management. The current challenge is to fulfill the required demand in the lack of available resources. A traditional way to provide more available resource is by increase in production, but it caused increment of indirect demand of other interlinked resources. Importing resources from other area (where local supply is redundant) is another option to secure local resources with additional economic expenditure. The WEF nexus-trading model adapts the previously developed nationwide nexus simulation model with additional input parameters and functions to simulate trading scenarios. In general, the analysis starts with the quantification of local resources deficit (potential importing amount) and redundancy (potential exporting amount) of each area. Then, a trade module is initiated by determining possible donor area and importation amount. Finally, the nexus simulation for all area is re-run to determine final resources supply-demand results including the trading amount. The trade option provides an opportunity to meet local demands without draining local resources. However, the production capability of donor area may limit the importation amount. The newly developed trade option allows more alternatives for stakeholders to determine resources management plans.