Guidance on evaluation and selection of sustainable water demand management technologies

This report presents guidance for the evaluation and selection of Water Demand Management (WDM) type technologies for the effective and efficient reduction of water consumption for different water stakeholders - householders, Water Service Providers (WSPs) and policy makers - in a technically sound, yet economically, environmentally and socially acceptable way for all stakeholders involved. The technical guidance is based on reviews of different WDM technologies and methodologies developed in Work Package 42 of the TRUST project. The WDM interventions considered in the report have been evaluated largely based on the their overall water saving potential, cost-effectiveness, water-related energy use as well as impact on the reliability of supply/demand balance of Water Distribution Systems (WDSs).Bello-Dambatta, A.; Kapelan, Z.; Butler, D.; Oertlé, E.; Wintgens, T.; Rozos, E.; Makropoulos, C.... (2014). Guidance on evaluation and selection of sustainable water demand management technologies. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/3534

OpenHi.net: A Synergistically Built, National-Scale Infrastructure for Monitoring the Surface Waters of Greece

The large-scale surface-water monitoring infrastructure for Greece Open Hydrosystem Information Network (Openhi.net) is presented in this paper. Openhi.net provides free access to water data, incorporating existing networks that manage their own databases. In its pilot phase, Openhi.net operates three telemetric networks for monitoring the quantity and the quality of surface waters, as well as meteorological and soil variables. Aspiring members must also offer their data for public access. A web-platform was developed for on-line visualization, processing and managing telemetric data. A notification system was also designed and implemented for inspecting the current values of variables. The platform is built upon the web 2.0 technology that exploits the ever-increasing capabilities of browsers to handle dynamic data as a time series. A GIS component offers web-services relevant to geo-information for water bodies. Accessing, querying and downloading geographical data for watercourses (segment length, slope, name, stream order) and for water basins (area, mean elevation, mean slope, basin order, slope, mean CN-curve number) are provided by Web Map Services and Web Feature Services. A new method for estimating the streamflow from measurements of the surface velocity has been advanced as well to reduce hardware expenditures, a low-cost ‘prototype’ hydro-telemetry system (at about half the cost of a comparable commercial system) was designed, constructed and installed at six monitoring stations of Openhi.net

Data and code for the exploratory data analysis of the electrical energy demand in the time domain in Greece

We present data and code for visualizing the electrical energy data and weather-, climate-related and socioeconomic variables in the time domain in Greece. The electrical energy data include hourly demand, weekly-ahead forecasted values of the demand provided by the Greek Independent Power Transmission Operator and pricing values in Greece. We also present the daily temperature in Athens and the Gross Domestic Product of Greece. The code combines the data to a single report, which includes all visualizations with combinations of all variables in multiple time scales. The data and code were used in Tyralis et al. (2017) [1]

The role of technology in the water–energy–food nexus. A case study: Kerinthos, North Euboea, Greece

The water–energy–food (WEF) nexus is a basic element of prosperity, yet it is not equally distributed on the land. Human progress has optimized the function of the WEF nexus to bridge the inequality gap. In order to understand this progress, this study compares the preindustrial and modern agricultural practices in an area in Greece. Interviews were conducted with an elderly man who lived in the 1950s, and the process was quantified in units of WEF. The same procedure was also carried out with modern farmers for modern agricultural practices. In comparing the past and present agricultural processes, it is observed that today, a farmer can feed approximately 100 times more people. This feat has been achieved as modern practices push the land with energy sources in multiple ways (fuels and fertilizers). However, energy indices such as energy ratio, net energy gain, specific energy, and energy productivity do not seem to be improved. Furthermore, farmers prefer to pump underground water for irrigation, instead of utilizing the nearby river, as was done in the past when the river provided both energy to the watermill and an abundance of water for irrigation. In addition, as the price of wheat is dependent on the stock market, even in 2023, there are risks to food security, the cultivation of wheat was not economically efficient for farmers in this area in 2023

Values and Costs in History: A Case Study on Estimating the Cost of Hadrianic Aqueduct’s Construction

The pursuit of wealth has been a basic occupation of humans; as it turns out, wealth increases life expectancy. Analyzing global data, we show that money, probably connected with medical care, increase life expectancy. However, the base of real wealth is access to the Water–Energy–Food nexus, and the access to this also increases life expectancy. The first objective of this study was to compare the present values of wealth with antiquity, and we showed that about 1.4 billion people live in the present under the average lower wages of antiquity. As a case study, we analyze the construction of the Hadrianic aqueduct. We present a detailed description of the construction and the used methods, and we identify the total requirement of labor–time. Then, we investigate the wages of various occupations in the first century AD. The second objective of this study was the estimation of the total cost of daily wages for the construction of the project and the effect of the aqueduct on Athenians’ quality of life. Finally, we show that, today, about two billion people live with less available water than Athenians had with the Hadrianic aqueduct in the second century A.D

In Search of Climate Crisis in Greece Using Hydrological Data: 404 Not Found

In the context of implementing the European Flood Directive in Greece, a large set of rainfall data was compiled with the principal aim of constructing rainfall intensity–timescale–return period relationships for the entire country. This set included ground rainfall data as well as non-conventional data from reanalyses and satellites. Given the European declaration of climate emergency, along with the establishment of a ministry of climate crisis in Greece, this dataset was also investigated from a climatic perspective using the longest of the data records to assess whether or not they support the climate crisis doctrine. Monte Carlo simulations, along with stationary Hurst–Kolmogorov (HK) stochastic dynamics, were also employed to compare data with theoretical expectations. Rainfall extremes are proven to conform with the statistical expectations under stationarity. The only notable climatic events found are the clustering (reflecting HK dynamics) of water abundance in the 1960s and dry years around 1990, followed by a recovery from drought conditions in recent years