A2-4: Energy-Water-Urban Nexus
Forrest Meggers, Assistant Professor – Princeton University
What is it that makes the Energy-Water Nexus urban? It is the density of people. People condensed create urban space, and the consolidation of infrastructure has resulted in an explicit exchange between energy and water. Our research exposes a direct concession between energy and water at systematic level, both for our water and waste water infrastructure as well as our energy interactions in the urban environment. Population consolidated produces consolidated demand for water and energy. The result of this demand is an extensive output of low value waste streams, and residual energy dissipation. In order to address the challenges generated by the growing urban scale in the domain of energy and water we aim to expose opportunities to better qualify and quantify the value in water and energy systems. We will cover the residual opportunities in energy laden wastewater streams, and we will describe the overlooked impacts of neglected latent water influences on energy systems performance for heating and cooling. Finally, and integrating more directly with the previously presented UWIN work, we will explore the relationship of urban climate with latent radiant energy exchanges between people, water, plants, buildings, and the larger urban form.
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