The Complex Relationship and Looming Crisis Between Our Thirst For Water and Our Hunger for Energy
October 6th, 2013
Via the Union of Concerned Scientists, a look at watergy issues:
While a lot of folks are rightly focused on the House-Senate budget collision in D.C. right now, I’ve been thinking (as is my wont) about collisions of a different sort: between power plants and the rivers and lakes they depend on.
In both types of collisions, different parties see things differently, and choices get made that have long-term impacts. I’m not sure how to fix Washington, but a clear view of current energy-water collisions can certainly help point us to the fixes there.
In the case of energy-water decisions, the choices and fixes have to do with what power sources and technologies we look to for meeting our electricity needs, how water comes into play, and what other choices we have.
- What kinds of new power plants and cooling systems are we putting in?
- What are we choosing to do about old plants, likely to be less efficient and thirstier?
- How much are we meeting our electricity demands with energy efficiency, or low-water renewables like wind and solar photovoltaics?
The decisions we’re making now will help determine how much riskier or more resilient our electricity system becomes, as our recent Water-Smart Power study showed clearly.
What’s new?
Meanwhile, our past decisions have helped set the stage for collisions — or for avoiding collisions — across the country, in different ways. Older nuclear and coal plants may withdraw large amounts of water, and put back much hotter water. Newer facilities may withdraw much less but consume more. Natural gas plants have been built in lots of different ways, with different water implications.
We’ve focused on three ways water-cooled power plants have been getting into trouble: incoming water that’s too hot, outgoing water that’s too hot, or water that just isn’t there in the quantities the plant needs.
And now we’ve updated the map of incidents we’ve seen:
Recent energy-water collisions across the U.S. — north, south, east, and west. Plenty of reasons to think there have to be better ways of making sure our power plants are there for us when we need them.
The new version of the map includes a range of new entries, including:
- Pilgrim Nuclear Station – 2013 brought another example of a coastal plant getting into trouble, like the Connecticut Millstone nuclear plant in 2012. In this latest case, during a July Northeast heat wave, the Pilgrim nuclear plant had to briefly cut its output by 15 percent because the water coming in from Cape Cod Bay was too hot. Since that plant alone supplies a good chunk of Massachusetts’ electricity, even small drops can matter, especially in the middle of grueling heat waves.
- Hydro – Our research under the Energy and Water in a Warming World initiative hasn’t focused on the trouble that hydroelectric dams can get into. But the announcement in August of the historic cut in planned water releases from Lake Powell in 2014 got us thinking about a few past cases that seemed worth including. Some are particular facilities struggling with water issues, like Michigan’s Sault Sainte Marie in the summer of 2012. Others are whole networks of dams, as in the case of Bonneville Power in 2010.
What’s next? That’s up to us.
The government shutdown shows that collisions in Washington are, unfortunately, ongoing.
When it comes to energy-water collisions, the summer of 2013 was milder than many recent years (though certainly not in other respects, as Colorado can attest). But we know that droughts will come again, heat waves will be back, and additional energy-water collisions will strike.
And as we keep making the power sector choices that build the electricity system of the future, how much will we learn from the past? How much will we consider the value of avoiding energy-water collisions, and make water-smart choices? When the next crisis comes, how ready will we be?
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 6th, 2013 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Educated at Yale University (Bachelor of Arts - History) and Harvard (Master in Public Policy - International Development), Monty Simus has held a lifelong interest in environmental and conservation issues, primarily as they relate to freshwater scarcity, renewable energy, and national park policy. Working from a water-scarce base in Las Vegas with his wife and son, he is the founder of Water Politics, an organization dedicated to the identification and analysis of geopolitical water issues arising from the world’s growing and vast water deficits, and is also a co-founder of SmartMarkets, an eco-preneurial venture that applies web 2.0 technology and online social networking innovations to motivate energy & water conservation. He previously worked for an independent power producer in Central Asia; co-authored an article appearing in the Summer 2010 issue of the Tulane Environmental Law Journal, titled: “The Water Ethic: The Inexorable Birth Of A Certain Alienable Right”; and authored an article appearing in the inaugural issue of Johns Hopkins University's Global Water Magazine in July 2010 titled: “H2Own: The Water Ethic and an Equitable Market for the Exchange of Individual Water Efficiency Credits.”