Water storage cost price and analysis

What is the future of water storage?

What the Future Has in Store: A New Paradigm for Water Storage calls for developing and driving multi-sectoral solutions to the water storage gap, taking approaches that integrate needs and opportunities across the whole system, including natural, built, and hybrid storage, to support many instead of few, for generations to come.

Why is water storage important?

• Water storage provides three major services: improving the availability of water; reducing the impacts of floods; and regulating water flows to support energy, transportation, and other sectors. • At the same time, the regulation provided by storage can produce clean energy, needed to mitigate climate change.

How much does electricity cost in the water sector?

Energy intensity and electricity costs vary considerably across the water sector 19, 20; electricity typically represents approximately 30–50% of advanced water treatment lifetime costs, 60–80% of distribution and transmission costs and 20–30% of wastewater treatment costs 20, 21, 22.

Do energy storage systems provide value?

Energy storage systems face a unique challenge when attempting to assign value to the services they can provide. An energy storage system could act as a generator, a load, or a transmission/distribution resource.

Why are water treatment assets different in the water sector?

Within the water sector, the differences in the latent flexibility of drinking water treatment, water distribution and wastewater treatment assets are a result of underlying differences in process dynamics, supply chain constraints and asset coupling, the degree of digitization and economic structures.

How can water asset flexibility be represented in grid-scale energy storage metrics?

Here we present a unified framework for representing water asset flexibility using grid-scale energy storage metrics (round-trip efficiency, energy capacity and power capacity) and assessing the technoeconomic benefits of energy flexibility at the water facility scale (levelized cost of water and levelized value of flexibility).