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Water needs electricity needs water …

Posted by: Maven on May 22, 2009 at 8:22 am

From the New York Times:

It has long been an axiom of infrastructure planning that it takes a lot of water to make electricity, and a lot of electricity to make water.

Each day, for example, the nation’s thermoelectric power plants (90 percent of all power plants in the United States), draw 136 billion gallons of water from lakes, rivers and oceans to cool the steam used to drive turbines, according to the Department of Energy. In recent years, the energy department says, plans for new power plants had to be scrapped because water-use permits could not be obtained.

For their part, water- and wastewater utilities consume at least 13 percent of the electricity drawn nationwide each day, according to River Network, an environmental group based in Portland, Ore. Such plants face increasing public pressure to cut energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions.

So it was of no small significance that Poseidon Resources last week managed to win approval from California state regulators to build the Western Hemisphere’s largest desalination plant, near San Diego.

Water is an increasingly scarce commodity in the West, so ocean desalination projects are attractive to city and regional planners. But desalination is also inherently energy-intensive, and it will take more electricity to desalinate water at the new facility than to import it from elsewhere, as the utility does now.

Read more from the New York Times by clicking here.

May 22, 2009 · Filed Under Uncategorized

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