Water and Sustainable Environmental Planning
Project
Water Demand Prognosis 2030 for the Supply Area Hamburger Wasserwerke GmbH
Project Head:
Project team:
Dr. Konrad Götz
Dr. Stefan Liehr
Dipl.-Ing. Jutta Deffner
Cooperation:
COOPERATIVE Infrastruktur und Umwelt Darmstadt:
Dr. Bernhard Michel,
Dipl.-Kaufmann Florian Michel, Dr. Wulf Rüthrich
Client:
Hamburger Wasserwerke (HWW) GmbH
Duration :
05/2006 - 04/2007
Water Demand Prognosis 2030 for the Supply Area Hamburger Wasserwerke GmbH
Medium- to long-term water demand prognoses are crucial instruments for water supply companies as they facilitate strategic business decisions, sustainable planning and actions concerning water law. The water supplier of the metropolitan region of Hamburg, Hamburger Wasserwerke (HWW), have assigned ISOE and COOPERATIVE Darmstadt with the task to develop a medium- and long-term prognosis of water demand for the service area of HWW until the year 2030.
Compared to conventional water demand prognoses, there are two fundamental innovations in the newly developed concept: On the one hand, spatially differentiated analyses are conducted by using the geographic information system (GIS), while social as well as technical and behaviour-based factors influencing water demand are considered on the other. The spatially differentiated approach based on extensive georeferenced data creates a complex basis for the prognosis. This facilitates the consideration of structural residential patterns in a much more differentiated way while partial spatiality allows an optimised utilisation of the data. Moreover, the prognosis will consider mutual dependencies of sociocultural, technical and behaviour-based impact factors on water demand explored by empirical research. While conventional prognoses are usually limited to technical determinants; the outlined concept incorporates the actual mutual dependency of social structure, technology and utilisation patterns for the first time.
The implementation of the concept is based on a differentiated and methodological approach which considers the relevant consumer and costumer groups. Besides empirical surveys with household- and commercial clients as well as public institutions (e.g. hospitals, schools, administration) it also incorporates expert interviews, evaluation of different kind of data and spatially differentiated analyses. The consolidation of results will be enframed in an integrated prognosis model which considers possible impacts of uncertainty factors identified in a scenario-based assessment. This guarantees transparency in further assessment and decision making and enables expert-based adaptation to future processes.