Dr. Lu Liu

Water-Energy Nexus and Environmental Sustainability

I am currently a post-doctoral research associate in Dr. Qilin Li’s lab, and I work in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. My research interests and experience lie in the areas of integrated water resources management, systems analysis for integrated water and energy systems, climate change impacts on water-energy nexus, and urban environmental sustainability.

A little more about me. I grew up in China. I came to the US for my undergraduate in Environmental Science at the University of Oklahoma. I went on to do my M.S. in Environmental Science with a water resources track in Dr. Yang Hong's lab. I worked at the Joint Global Change Research Institute for two years before I went on to do my Ph.D. at University of Maryland with Dr. Barton Forman and Dr. Mohamad Hejazi, where I investigated a comprehensive modeling framework designed to assess and evaluate water and energy system’s vulnerability and adaptability to climate change and socioeconomic development. I am happy to continue my career development at Rice University, where I am leading a project focused on understanding the impact of decentralizing urban water infrastructure via direct potable water reuse.

My Curriculum Vitae

Recent Publications

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Decentralized direct potable water reuse: the importance of system configuration

Under review, 2019

This work emphasizes the need to quantitatively characterize and evaluate decentralization of urban water system, which has not be explicitly studied in earlier research. We demonstrated the environmental and economic implications of decentralizing urban water infrastructure via direct potable water reuse (DPR) using a modeling framework developed in this study. This quantitative analysis suggest that with the appropriate configuration, decentralized DPR could potentially alleviate stress on freshwater and enhance urban water sustainability and resilience at a competitive cost.

Implications of water constraints on electricity capacity expansion in the United States

Nature Sustainability, February 25, 2019

This work emphasizes the need to integrate water availability constraints into strategic resource planning, which has long been neglected in analyses of electricity capacity expansion in the U.S. We explicitly demonstrated the different impacts of including water constraints on electricity capacity planning across the fifty states of the U.S. using a state-level model of the U.S. energy system embedded within a global integrated assessment model (GCAM-USA). Our analysis suggests that including water constraints in capacity expansion planning could have important economic implications on the U.S. power sector as a whole and across states.

Vulnerability of US thermoelectric power generation to climate change when incorporating state-level environmental regulations

Nature Energy, July 10, 2017

This work quantifies the impact of climate change on U.S. thermoelectric generation. We explicitly included in our modeling framework the U.S. state-level environmental regulations on thermal effluents, as well as relieving mechanisms (provisional variances) to better reproduce historical thermoelectric output. We show that adding these complexities brings our estimates closer to historical observations and significantly reduces the adverse impact of climate change on usable capacity. Contrary to previous work, we found that climate change alone has a small direct impact on thermoelectric generation in the U.S.

Complete publication list