Due to a growing population and growing climate concerns, an increased global demand for renewable power capacity is observed, which can place great stresses on food and water resources in semi-arid areas. The aim of this work is to optimize the allocation of renewable energy generation and storage technologies considering various objectives such as cost, energy production, and water and land use. Detailed high-fidelity modeling of various energy-generating processes, including solar farms, wind farms, and biomass, is performed. An optimization strategy is developed to first obtain the energy output profiles of the various renewable energy generation technologies. The derived profiles are subsequently used as inputs to a mixed-integer linear optimization step to obtain the optimal allocation for each scenario. It is shown that geographic factors, energy demands, and resource availabilities can greatly affect the optimal energy production and storage methods, which stresses the significance of the proposed decision-making tool.

Decision-making tool for the optimal selection and allocation of renewable energy generation and storage systems under food-energy-water nexus considerations

ACS Fall 2021

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