Subject: Can we Use the WEAP Model for Water Food Energy Nexus? Posted: 2/1/2024 Viewed: 2238 times
Dear WEAP community,
I am sure you all doing excellent.
I would like to ask that can we use the WEAP Model for a Nexus approach, especially for Water-Food-Energy (WFE) Nexus? If yes, any clue or hint.
As I have gone through a number of papers in which the claim to use the WEAP for WFE Nexus but there are certain limitation which are not affordable in nexus approach.
Regards,
Naveed
Mr. Brian Joyce
Subject: Re: Can we Use the WEAP Model for Water Food Energy Nexus? Posted: 2/1/2024 Viewed: 2193 times
Dear Naveed,
Yes. WEAP can be used to evaluate an integrated Water-Energy-Food system. As you are probably already aware, in addition to the various methods WEAP uses to simulate the water system, the tool includes the ability to simulate hydropower generation and agricultural production (using either MABIA or the Plant Growth Model routines). So it is possible then to use WEAP to evaluate tradeoffs between water, energy, and food under different climate projections, management scenarios, etc.
However, it is important to understand that WEAP only considers energy generated from hydropower, which is most often a smaller part of a much larger system. Unless you have concrete hydropower targets and operational logic, then WEAP may not dispatch hydropower to the grid in a realistic manner. For this reason, we (SEI) usually link WEAP to an energy model, such as LEAP, which handles the dispatch of energy. Using this approach, WEAP runs first and passes hydropower generation to LEAP (or another energy model), which uses these values as the maximum available hydropower. If this amount exceeds the amount that is dispatched by the energy model, then new values can be passed back to WEAP as hard constraints, which will lead to reduction in reservoir releases for hydropower and an increase in available water for other purposes.
With respect to food, WEAP's MABIA and PGM (plant growth model) hydrology methods both use well-established approaches for estimating crop water requirements and production (FAO 56). The PGM has the benefit that it considers heat stress and CO2 concentrations. However, the tradeoff is that it is more data intensive.
Dr. Naveed Ahmed
Subject: Re: Can we Use the WEAP Model for Water Food Energy Nexus? Posted: 2/5/2024 Viewed: 2007 times
Dear Brian Joyce,
First of all, I would like to say many thanks for your detailed reply.
yes, I am using WEAP since 2014 and have a good command at WEAP Model. However, I am trying to use the WEAP for WEF Nexus.
As you mentioned that we can connect LEAP model with WEAP model, however, I did not want to link WEAP with LEAP. Because, our focus is only on the hydropower generation. I will be limited to the Reservoir node and we can say that this is the limitation of our this study.
Meanwhile, we have the reservoir parameters data sets as input.
I would like to ask one more question that during WEF Nexus approach modeling with WEAP, which parameters can be focused during calibration?
Regards
Naveed
Topic "Can we Use the WEAP Model for Water Food Energy Nexus?"
