The impact of storage facilities on the simultaneous economic dispatch of power and water networks limited by ramping constraints

Recently, the production and consumption of energy and water resources and their potential coupling in what is often called the energy-water nexus has gained attention as an issue of global concern[1, 2]. Ultimately, a significant amount of water is required to produce energy and vice versa [2, 3]; motivating the need for co-optimization based approaches for the two resources. Recently, one such simultaneous co-optimization method has been contributed for the economic dispatch of networks that include water, power and co-production facilities [4]. That study showed that capacity and process constraints often limit total production cost. This paper seeks to add plant ramping behavior as potentially binding constraints and investigate the impact of water and storage facilities as a technology that can help alleviate binding constraints and lead to more levelized production and cost levels. The paper builds upon the optimization program provided in previous work [4] to develop two optimization programs with and without storage facilities and compares their respective results. Storage facilities are shown to reduce total operating costs and lead to more levelized daily production suggesting that they have an important role to play in the optimization of the energy-water nexus.