The metropolitan region of São Paulo (MRSP) has suffered from its worst drought in history, which started in 2013 and is not over yet in 2018. With 21.4 million inhabitants, the region has one of the largest water supply systems in the world, consisting of ten partially interlinked reservoir systems. Cantareira system is the largest, serving about nine million inhabitants. Mitigation measures for the drought included pumping water from the dead storage in the Cantareira system, operational changes, pressure reduction at night, and discounts as water saving incentives. The newly built water transfer system from the Jaguari Reservoir improves the reliability of the Cantareira system, but has significant energy cost and competes with energy production and water supply to downstream cities. The newly built water transfer system from the São Lourenço Reservoir has very high energy cost and competes with energy production in a highly productive cascade of hydropower plants. The primary role of the two newly built water transfer systems is to increase water security. Water savings and expansion of the water system allowed the storage to recover in the main reservoirs and eased the more severe mitigation measures. However, characteristics of the newly built water transfer systems bring new challenges for planning and management of the water supply. This paper discusses using the SISAGUA, a previously developed nonlinear optimization model, to evaluate aspects of cost-effective, reliability, and resilience of the newly expanded water supply system and points out limitations and suggestions to deal with its increased complexity.
Artigo retirado do site: https://ascelibrary.org/doi/abs/10.1061/9780784482339.012