Powering & watering agriculture: Application of energy-water nexus planning

This paper seeks to motivate an innovative approach to support new and sustainable solutions for increasing agricultural productivity in developing nations. Specifically, it holistically tackles the energy-water nexus as an engineering system and proposed the development of an integrated planning framework which stakeholders in developing countries can use to make decisions that support agricultural capacity. Thus far, the literature has focused on (i) discussions of various policy options (ii) technical surveys of energy and water intensities. In contrast, this paper presents a meta-architecture of the energy-water nexus in the electricity supply, engineered water supply and wastewater management systems developed using the Systems Modeling Language (SysML). Its quantization is then applied on a conceptual example inspired by the Egyptian geography. The paper concludes with useful measures that can be directly incorporated into agricultural capacity planning. In so doing, the paper begins efforts for coordinated control, operation and planning to overcome this large-scale, multidisciplinary problem made up of technical, economic, and social dimensions.