Full Description

In June of 2002, the California Urban Water Conservation Council decidedto automate the calculation of water savings from the water conservationprogram activities reported by water agencies statewide on the Council's BestManagement Practices (BMP) Reporting Database Website. Since its launchingin 2000, the BMP Reporting Website has enabled water agencies to report onlinein great detail their conservation program accomplishments, with the activitiesthen aggregating in a database to produce statewide summaries. However, untilrecently, the numbers reported in the BMP Reporting Database represented onlynumbers of specific intervention activities, not any water savings estimates ofthose interventions.Proclamations of the water savings produced vary widely from wateragency to water agency. Each water agency chooses its own calculationmethod, assumptions, and factors and thus develops its own savingsrepresentations, which may or may not be truly accurate. Thus, no reliablesavings estimates have ever been produced "from the ground up" in California,even in the State's Water Plan. Estimates of the amount of conservationachieved statewide to date have been speculative at best, and fraudulent atworst.This paper presents a savings model that was built in the Spring of2003 to automatically calculate the savings for activities reported within the BMPReporting database, according to consistent and established criteria. Theassumptions and methods used in the model are outlined, along with theresults obtained. Factors such as savings decay and free ridership have beenincorporated. The paper also includes a live demonstration of the BMPReporting Website and how the water savings model itself has been webenabled to be interactive with the user.

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Edition: Vol. - No. Published: 01/11/2004 Number of Pages: 7 File Size: 1 file , 230 KB