In June of 2002, the California Urban Water Conservation Council decided
to automate the calculation of water savings from the water conservation
program activities reported by water agencies statewide on the Council's Best
Management Practices (BMP) Reporting Database Website. Since its launching
in 2000, the BMP Reporting Website has enabled water agencies to report online
in great detail their conservation program accomplishments, with the activities
then aggregating in a database to produce statewide summaries. However, until
recently, the numbers reported in the BMP Reporting Database represented only
numbers of specific intervention activities, not any water savings estimates of
those interventions.
Proclamations of the water savings produced vary widely from water
agency to water agency. Each water agency chooses its own calculation
method, assumptions, and factors and thus develops its own savings
representations, which may or may not be truly accurate. Thus, no reliable
savings estimates have ever been produced "from the ground up" in California,
even in the State's Water Plan. Estimates of the amount of conservation
achieved statewide to date have been speculative at best, and fraudulent at
worst.
This paper presents a savings model that was built in the Spring of
2003 to automatically calculate the savings for activities reported within the BMP
Reporting database, according to consistent and established criteria. The
assumptions and methods used in the model are outlined, along with the
results obtained. Factors such as savings decay and free ridership have been
incorporated. The paper also includes a live demonstration of the BMP
Reporting Website and how the water savings model itself has been web
enabled to be interactive with the user.
| Edition : | Vol. - No. |
| File Size : | 1
file
, 230 KB |
| Note : | This product is unavailable in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus |
| Number of Pages : | 7 |
| Published : | 01/11/2004 |
