Node thickness is comparable for a diagram but not between areas due to separate value scales
MAWEI - Metro Atlanta Water Energy Interdependencies is a flow account of water and energy for the 15-counties in the Atlanta metropolitan region, covering consistently over 5-years from 2020 through 2024, for water, energy, and combined energy-water systems.
Node height is proportional to the flows. Flows advance left to right, from sources through conversion and distribution to end uses and terminal sinks. Losses and waste are grouped at the top of the right-hand column in both systems, so the share of the system that is never used can be read as one block.
Water has cooler colors and energy has warmer colors. In the combined view two further colors mark the couplings that make this a nexus rather than two separate accounts: the electricity spent moving and treating water, and the water withdrawn to cool thermal generation.
Water is accounted in million gallons per day (MGD). Energy is held internally in exajoules and displayed in petajoules (PJ), with gigawatt-hours available for electricity-generating nodes. The unit control converts on the fly; the underlying figures do not change.
This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy's Hydropower and Hydrokinetic Office (H2O), Energy-Water Resource (EWR) Program.
The work was performed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) under Integrated Water-Power Resilience (IWPR) project. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is operated by Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC05-76RL01830.
We thank the Metro Atlanta stakeholders for their contributions and support.
Data and code are available on github.com/IWPRp/MAWEI.
For questions or comments, please contact Hassan Niazi and Kelsey Semrod at PNNL.