In this project, HARC assisted DELWP and Victoria’s water authorities to define and apply a stress test of the Victorian water grid, to better understand the resilience of Victoria’s integrated water supply systems to severe but plausible scenarios.
The project involved working with DELWP, Melbourne Water, Barwon Water and Western Water to develop an appropriate combination of climate, bushfire and consumptive demand conditions that could be modelled in the Melbourne Water headworks REALM model, and the connected system Source models.
Potential water resource management responses that would mitigate the consequences of the modelled scenarios were then tested in a workshop with representatives from across the Victorian water industry.
The project demonstrated that stress tests are useful for identifying potential vulnerabilities in integrated systems before a crisis emerges.
