Slashdot Mirror
Collision Between Water and Energy Is Underway, and Worsening
An anonymous reader writes "This article is an eye opening perspective on another side effect of power generation — water usage: 'More than 40 percent of fresh water used in the United States is withdrawn to cool power plants. Renewable energy generally uses far less water, but there are glaring exceptions, such as geothermal and concentrating solar.' The article also mentions that power plants have to shut down if the incoming water is too warm to cool the plant. 'Also, even though some newer plants might use far less water, they could find that there’s far less water available as water temperatures go up and water flows go down. Another study found that nearly half of 423 U.S. plants were at risk of lower power output during droughts because their intake pipes for water were less than 3 meters below the surface.'"
More power plants = more greenhouse gases = global warming = higher seas
You know, assuming that all of these power plants output greenhouse gases. If not, someone needs to get on that.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I live close to the new NSA data center in Bluffdale, Utah. Currently we are under a drought with widespread municipal water restrictions, yet the NSA surveillance center requires 1.7M gallons of water daily to operate.
It doesn't seem entirely out of line. From my hydrology textbook last year: cooling edges out agriculture for water utilization nationally, and both are much higher than the third biggest, which I believe is landscaping use.
But hey, the textbook could be entirely wrong. I'm sure your 90% figure is well-sourced.
When you put generators down 5-6000 feet in deep fast ocean currents, which run virtually at constant speed year round, the amount of power available down there is staggering. Obviously it only works near coastline regions, but that is where the large populations tend to be, though not all coasts have deep water currents.
Superconducting long distance transmission lines are improving in capability, so maybe distance is not so much a problem in the future.
It is not technically difficult or polluting. We already put complex anchors and devices at those depths for oil drilling.
No need for radioactive stuff, no cooling, no dead birds, no pulsing noise to humans, no polution.
It takes damn good engineering, but that is what we are damn good at.
Start now.
Total water withdrawals in the United States for 2005 were estimated for eight categories of use: public supply, domestic, irrigation, livestock, aquaculture, industrial, mining, and thermoelectric-power generation (fig. 1). Thermoelectric power was the largest category of water use, followed by irrigation and public supply
Page 5 has pictures and data, you might like that.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days