Water systems — from pumping and treatment to distribution and end use — are among the largest electricity consumers in most municipalities, and energy accounts for up to 40% of operating costs at water utilities. The WE3 Lab exploits this coupling by developing optimization and control frameworks that harness the inherent flexibility of water and wastewater infrastructure to provide grid services, reduce electricity costs, and facilitate renewable integration.
Our work spans multiple scales: individual flexible assets such as variable-speed pumps and treatment processes, aggregated demand response programs managed by utilities, and grid-level market mechanisms that enable water systems to participate as active grid resources. We draw on stochastic and robust optimization, model predictive control, and reinforcement learning to operate across the water-energy interface under uncertainty.
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