Today’s Challenge:  Energy vs. Water

Fact:  A power plant uses three times as much water to provide electricity to the average American household as the family uses through its showers, toilets and taps.

Fact: American public water supply and treatment facilities consume about 50 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) a year, enough electricity to power 4.5+ million homes.

Fact: If one of every 100 American families retrofitted its home with water-efficient fixtures, including a low-flow toilet, we’d save 100 million kWh of electricity a year, avoiding 75,000 tons of greenhouse gas. It’s like removing 15,000 cars from the road.

Today electric utilities account for a whopping 20 percent of all nonfarm water consumed in the United States. Whether running on fossil fuels, nuclear fission or geothermal sources, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a traditional power plant inhales 136 billion gallons of freshwater a day. And researchers warn that any large-scale move to biofuels would be "even more water-intensive," says Ronald Pate of Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque.
 
At the current rising rate of demand, by 2030 utilities could require 60 percent of all nonfarm water to cool their generators and scrub pollutants. So, utility companies are desperately seeking new sources of water. In fact, "Utilities are beginning to recognize that water is becoming a greater permitting issue than air quality," says Thomas Feeley III, a technology manager at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh.
 
Moving to capture and recycle power plants’ cooling tower condensation 20 to 50 times before releasing it as evaporation or hauling it off for cleanup is only part of the solution. The real need is to cut public demand for power.
 
Sources: U.S. EPA WaterSense Program