Throughout this hotter than usual summer, you may have briefly entertained a thought about the tradeoffs between water and the need for energy – a link connected merely by the brutal heat that caused higher desire for both. However, perhaps you thought nothing else about it beyond watching a few seconds of a news update on Lake Houston, or waited for your A/C to kick-in and make it a few degrees cooler. Well the connection between these two resources are actually far more profound then you realize. And they both may become more complicated and critical to our way of life in the near future.
The long drought has denied us our usual supply of healthy Texas lakes and busy rivers. Meanwhile the Sun that has belted down on us with such extreme heat it has as caused us to further crank-up our cooling systems, drawing ever more demand upon the electric grid. However, going on behind the scenes while we have been figuring out when and how to get water for your lawns, so too have our electric utilities been scrambling to draw upon more water to run and cool their much busier power plants. Declining water tables in the rivers mean hydro-electric power production is less a factor; thus nuclear, coal and natural gas plants – which all rely on water in the generation processes as well as for cooling – are now feeding more of our demand load. A demand complicated further by your water utilities needing more power to run the water pumps and processing facilities being used to help bring water to your lawn.
A recent article in the New York Times outlines this nexus of energy and water issue quite well using Texas as a point of focus.
The worries in Texas bear out what an increasingly vocal group of researchers has been warning in recent years: that planners must pay more attention to how much water is needed in energy production.
“Water and energy are really linked,” said Henrik Larsen, a water policy expert with the DHI Group, a research and consulting firm based in Denmark. “If you save water, you save energy, and vice-versa.”
Experts call this the “water-energy nexus.” It takes huge quantities of water to produce electricity from a plant powered by nuclear energy or fossil fuels, and it also takes lots of energy to pump and process the water that irrigates fields and supplies cities.
In the United States, 4 percent of all fresh water is consumed in the energy sector, and 3 percent of all electricity used daily goes toward water and wastewater pumping, distribution, and treatment, according to Mike Hightower, a member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories.
A big problem, experts say, is that water is often taken for granted.
“We simply don’t value water in the same way that we value energy,” said Mr. Larsen of DHI. He noted that whereas barrels of oil get shipped around the globe, nobody wants to ship water in the same way.
How Energy Drains Water Supplies – NYTimes 9/19
With a warmer and dry climate in Texas likely to continue, we may have a real scarcity of fresh water available in our future for the competing interests of homeowners, power plants and other industry. And our continued reliance on power to help us adjust and overcome the resulting situation may be leading to further folly. A folly complicated by the fact that other forms of energy, beyond just electric generation, are also demanding a share of our limited fresh water supplies.
The two newest fuel options going have their own complicated and troublesome connection with water. Tar sands, which many feel hold promise to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, actually require intense boiling to extract crude. Meanwhile natural gas from shale, which is being expanded through the use of hydraulic fracking, also relies on water (and oother fluids) to unlock new natural gas deposits. However, fracking also may be exasperating the nexus problem itself as reports persist that the process could be poisoning ground water near drilling operations.
But even if these concerns were not bad enough, the problems created by the water-energy nexus could get exponentially worse yet. That lawn that looks brown right now is largely ornamental, however, what happens when the competition is between your energy demand and the farm land necessary to feed us and the rest of the world? Already the United Nations is planning for meetings in November about the nexus in a 3-way relationship between water, energy and food. Food enters this nexus equation too now as production on the scale now needed to feed the world requires not merely water for irrigation, but also intense amounts of power and fuel to run the farms, oversee production, as well as distribute food to markets and nations around the world.
This growing nexus of concerns has already garnered the attention of the World Economic Forum, which produced the short video below that further outlines the details and tradeoffs involved in this nexus.
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