Navigating financial and supply reliability tradeoffs in regional drought management portfolios

摘要: Rising development costs and growing concerns over environmental impacts have led many communities to explore more diversified water management strategies. These “portfolio”-style approaches integrate existing supply infrastructure with other options such as conservation measures or transfers. Diversified portfolios been shown reduce the capacity required meet demand, while also providing greater adaptability changing hydrologic conditions. However, this additional flexibility can cause unexpected reductions in revenue (from conservation) increased transfers). The resulting financial instability act a substantial disincentive utilities seeking implement innovative techniques. This study seeks design that employ tools (e.g., contingency funds index insurance) fluctuations revenues costs, allowing these strategies achieve improved performance without sacrificing stability. analysis is applied of coordinated regional “Research Triangle” region North Carolina, an area comprising four rapidly municipalities. actions each independent utility become interconnected when shared utilized enable interutility transfers, requiring evaluation tradeoffs up five objectives. introduce significant between achieving reliability goals introducing burdensome variability annual and/or costs. Financial mitigation mitigate variability, for alternative suite solutions. provides general template navigate associated flexible, portfolio-style approaches.