Illustration showing a landscape split between cracked dry ground with a solar panel, and water with wind turbines and a dam under a stormy sky. Text: "WATER SCARCITY AND NATIONAL ENERGY SECURITY" is overlaid.

Slide images to go along with text including this: Critical Challenge: Increasing water scarcity, variability, and major hydrological events (droughts, floods) directly threaten the reliability, affordability, and security of our national energy supply. Current understanding and predictive capabilities of groundwater dynamics and the integrated water cycle are insufficient to manage these risks, impeding optimal energy planning, infrastructure siting, and operational efficiency. Bridging these scientific uncertainties is essential for developing energy solutions, advancing energy systems efficiency, and safeguarding critical national assets. DOE’s ESS program offers unparalleled capabilities to address this challenge through its integrated Modeling-Experimental (ModEx) approach. This enables foundational scientific discovery to advance predictive earth system models and decipher coupled water-energy dynamics. ESS ensures DOE’s mission priorities are met by: Developing high-fidelity models that mechanistically represent the integrated water cycle, including energy-natural system interactions, to provide accurate, multi-scale predictions of water availability and hydrological events critical for energy planning. Investigating the complex co-evolution of energy and water systems across scales under perturbation, identifying potential tipping points. ESS research clarifies how atmospheric, terrestrial, and subsurface processes influence water distribution and quality, directly See more