Katie Coughlin; Chris Bolduc; Peter Chan; Larry Dale; Jim McMahon; Robert Van Buskirk; Camilla Dunham Whitehead; LBNL

Contact: Katie Coughlin, (510) 486-5949, kcoughlin@lbl.gov

Role in The Energy-Water Nexus

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Water and Energy Technology Team (WETT) is researching ways to assign value to the environmental benefits gained by applying best management practices (BMPs) to water conservation in California. Currently, when urban water utilities implement water conservation programs, they assign values to the water saved and to the energy saved in treating and transporting that water. Their evaluation, however, excludes environmental benefits that may accrue from conservation programs. Our research will enable an environmentally and economically more appropriate evaluation by including quantified environmental benefits in determining the costs and benefits of a given water conservation program.

Research Objectives

The project goal is to develop an accurate characterization of the costs and benefits of adopting conservation measures, such as BMPs, within the cost-effectiveness analysis called for in the Memorandum of Understanding on Urban Water Conservation agreed to by municipal utilities. Assessing these costs/benefits requires considering: (1) the environmental impacts that might be triggered by adopting or abandoning individual water supply options, and (2) the opportunity cost associated with using a certain water supply.

Approach

Policy analysts in the WETT group will partner with faculty of the Agriculture Resource Economics Department at the University of California, Berkeley, bringing together a powerful set of interdisciplinary skills to perform this research. Databases of environmental values, characteristics of water supplies, and characteristics of municipal utilities will be integrated to construct marginal valuation matrices for use in a spreadsheet tool that will be developed for performing cost/benefit analysis of BMPs enacted to conserve water.

Accomplishments

Research deliverables include two technical reports (one on methodology, the other on data sources), a spreadsheet tool, and a user’s guide for California municipal utilities to consult when performing environmental valuations of BMPs.

Related Publications

Reports will be posted on the CUWCC website: http://www.cuwcc.com/committee_sub_avoided_cost_enviro_benefits.lasso

Acknowledgements

This project is funded and supported by the California Urban Water Conservation Council. The work was performed for the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC 03-76SF00098.