Extending the energy-water nexus reference architecture to the sustainable development of agriculture, industry & commerce

Clean energy and water are two essential resources that any society must securely deliver in order to develop sustainably. Traditionally, these two precious commodities are often treated as separate uncoupled systems. However, in reality, they are very much coupled in what is commonly known as the energy-water nexus. Recently, an infrastructure-centric reference architecture of the energy-water nexus in the electricity supply, engineered water supply and wastewater management systems has been developed; first graphically in SysML and later quantitatively using bond graphs. This made it possible to relate a region's energy and municipal water consumption to the required energy and water withdrawals in an input-output model so as to directly inform the planning & operations of energy-water infrastructure operators. In order to expand the utility of the model to high level policy decision-making, this paper now extends that work to address the sustainable development of agricultural, industrial, commercial and residential activities. In such a way, it relates the economic value of fossil fuels, food, products and commerce to input and waste streams of energy and water. Such a model provides high-level guidance to the design of sustainable development policies. Furthermore, the commitment to a physical modeling approach - unlike purely economic models - also directly informs the design of energy-water nexus infrastructure to achieve these sustainable development policy goals.