Economic Assessment in Development of Operating Policies for Inter- Basin Water Transfer

The water basin transfer project is an alternative for balancing the non-uniform temporal and local distribution of water resources and water demand, especially in arid and semi arid regions. A water transfer project can be executed if it can be economically and environmentally justified. In this study, this challenge has been investigated for water transfer from Solegan in the Khuzestan vicinity to Rafsanjan in Kerman. The environmental impacts of such a project on Karoon Rivers between the Gotvand Dam to Darkhoien are considered. Monthly water quality simulation was carried out and one year of observed data was used for model calibration. A multiple regression was performed to estimate river water quality variations based on the simulation results. The regression equations were used in calculating water quality and environmental costs imposed on the river by investigating the effect of the development plans with an economic based objective function. Then a mathematical model was developed to maximize the net benefit of interbasinwater transfer. Costs and benefits including agricultural production, hydropower generation, dredging, physical construction costs, pumping groundwater and environmental costs were also considered. The optimization period is 23 years (the length of historical data); and the Genetic Algorithms is used to solve the model. Model output is the optimum flow rate of water transfer in each month. For real time operation, an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model is developed. The results show that the high benefit of agriculture production in the Rafsanjan plain and the costs of decreasing agricultural production in Khuzestan plains are the governing factors.