Urban energy–water nexus based on modified input–output analysis

By Saige Wang, Tao Cao, Bin Chen. 2017

132 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The energy–water nexus in urban activities poses challenges for coordinating urban energy and water management. A difficulty in such nexus issue is the lack of a unified base for energy and water flows analysis, which hinders sustainable energy and water resource utilization. Given that, we proposed a modified input–output analysis to provide a unified framework to balance urban energy and water use, by using the case of China’s capital city–Beijing. First, we inventoried the energy–related water consumption and water–related energy consumption with emergy metric. The hybrid water flow, as the sum of the direct water flow and energy–related water flow, is combined with the hybrid energy flow to build the hybrid network. Then the complex interactions between economic sectors and the nexus impacts were explored via input–output analysis. The results show that Manufacture (Ma) provides the largest outflow of hybrid energy, and Agriculture (Ag) is the largest receiver. The major export–import pairs of hybrid water are Ag–Ma, Ma–Co (Construction), Service(Se)–Transportation and Mailing (Tr), Ma–Se, and Tr–Ma. These major export–import pairs (Ma–Ag) as well as Ma itself are the critical points for energy and water nexus management. The results of the nexus impacts showed that Ag, Tr, and Co are the most important sectors. This study may help identify the leverage points and regulating pathways of urban energy–water system and provide a better way for mitigating the urban energy and water pressures.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7e3f4cf14fc12d9827f29e112f633b716862fbda

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Environmental Engineering

1. K. Scott
2. Saige Wang
3. J. Barrett
4. Bin Chen
5. Anne Owen
6. Brian D. Fath
7. L. Yao
8. Xiaowei Chuai

In Water Science and Technology

1. Anne Owen
2. J. Barrett
3. K. Scott
4. Saige Wang
5. Brian D. Fath
6. Bin Chen
7. Alec Foster
8. B. Goldstein

Citations in the corpus

• Impacts of water and land resources exploitation on agricultural carbon emissions: The water-land-energy-carbon nexus (2018, background): “…(MFA) or substance flow analysis (SFA) (Warren-Rhodes and Koenig, 2001; Pataki et al., 2006; Zhou et al., 2013), input-output analysis (IOA) (Wang et al., 2017; White et al., 2017), life cycle assessment (LCA) (Venkatesh et al., 2014; Chang et al., 2015), ecological network analysis (ENA)…”
• Identifying critical supply chains and final products: An input-output approach to exploring the energy-water-food nexus (2018, methodology): “Wang and colleagues realise this approach by calculating energy-related water consumption and water-related energy consumption [26] using input-output (IO) approaches and Beijing as a case study.”
• Energy–water nexus under energy mix scenarios using input–output and ecological network analyses (2019, background): “Moreover, there are “structural tensions” between the water and energy sectors, where stresses and insecurities in one sector simultaneously become stresses for the other, and may lead to questionable tradeoffs between the security of water and energy resources [38-40, 4750].”
• A 40-year review of food–energy–water nexus literature and its application to the urban scale (2019, background): “…urban contexts (Chen et al2011,Zhang et al2013, Lu et al 2015) and FEW nexus challenges at urban (Chen and 13 Chen 2015) and other scales (Spiegelberg et al 2017, Wang et al 2017), but as with SD, the diffusion of ENA into IEmetabolism thinking has been limited (see Zhang et al2013, Lu et al2015).”