Behind one news story after another is the intensifying conflict between our need for water and our need for energy. Spot-on information and commentary about this elemental clash comes from Alec Prud’homme’s The Ripple Effect, a book that manages to elucidate the multilayered issue of water and the conflicts surrounding the quality, the ownership and the availability of it. The chapter to look at is “Water and Power.”
“After agriculture, power generation is the greatest user of water in the world,” Prud’homme informs us. “In the United States, some 190,000 million gallons of water is used every day to produce electricity. &Americans use as much water indirectly, by turning on lights and heating their homes, as they do directly, by brushing their teeth or spraying their lawns.”
Even solar projects, Prud’homme points out, use water. On the other side of the equation, water distribution uses energy. Four years ago, state agencies in California found that long-distance movement of the state’s water supplies, which travel south from the mountains through a chain of aqueducts, canals, pipes and pumps, was eating up “19 percent of the state’s electricity, 32 percent of its natural gas, and 88 billion gallons of diesel fuel a year.”
The Department of Energy says the U.S. will need 40 percent more energy by 2050 because of a projected population increase to 440 million. Sixteen hundred new power plants will be required, says the DOE. But, Prud’homme notes, officials in Arizona and Idaho have already begun refusing requests for permits for new power plants for fear the drawdown of water to cool them will create unacceptable shortages.
Before the choice between watering the lawn and turning on the lights morphs into a choice between filling the drinking glasses and turning on the lights (and the television and the computer), we need to understand the relationship between energy and water. We need, for example, to put pressure on utilities not to waste it.
Prud’homme points to new power plant cooling technologies that yield astronomical water savings; one is “closed loop” technology that recirculates a small amount of water rather than using a large volume once and then dumping it into waterways. “In 2008,” he says, “Pacific Gas and Electric opened the first closed-loop power plant in Antioch, California, and it cut water intake from 40,000 gallons a minute to 1.6 gallons a minute.” Our grandparents thought of water as an infinite resource; we don’t have that luxury.
