Analyzing the Impact of External Interventions on Water and Energy Demand: Cybersecurity’s Role in Sustainable Development

The nexus of water, food, and energy constitutes a fundamental aspect of sustainable development. Furthermore, the demand for water and energy is becoming more pronounced. Moreover, there is a growing importance placed on studying cyber security within the water-energy nexus. This research investigates the interdependence of these two systems, conceptualizing them as a water-energy nexus and effort has been conducted on optimizing the economic efficiency of electricity and water systems in order to minimize operating expenses. Subsequently, external interventions, such as the simultaneous injection of false data on both water and energy demand, were addressed through an optimization process in GAMS software. The results suggest that the value of the cost objective function remains constant when inaccurate data is introduced, which hinders the accurate estimation of the system by the system operator. in this system, both water and power loads are directly impacted by these interventions. In particular, the power and water load of the system have exhibited changes ranging from 1.5% to 17.99% for electric load and 3.87% to 17.1% for water load, in comparison to the previous state.