Clean energy sources like solar and wind use hardly no water—”except during the manufacturing process.” As a result, if carbon dioxide will not “become the make-or-break issue for new forms of power generation,” then water might, since power plants need access to large amounts of water.
For example, the Achilles heel of nuclear energy isn’t merely the buildup of radioactive waste but drought. Recent drought conditions in the southeast seriously threatened nuclear reactors to “throttle back or temporarily shut down . . . since drought [was] drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the awesome amounts of cooling water they need to operate,” and “during Europe’s brutal 2006 heat wave, French, Spanish and German utilities were forced to shut down some of their nuclear plants and reduce power at others because of low water levels – some for as much as a week.” Because of the drought, utilities in the southeast were considering to purchase replacement energy on the wholesale market. However, replacement energy on the wholesale market during the summer would have cost these utilities “10 times” what nuclear energy normally costs. From the Wall Street Journal blog “Environmental Capital”:
The water issue affects all kinds of power generation—coal, natural gas, and nuclear power; the nuclear industry’s water appetite in particular has become a flashpoint for criticism. The U.S. Geological Survey figures power plants are the second-biggest users of water in the U.S., behind agriculture.
The irony is that efforts to fight climate change could make the situation even worse: TheNational Energy Technology Laboratory estimates that “clean coal” plants that capture and store carbon emissions would make the power sector an even bigger consumer of water if the still-to-be-developed plants are widely deployed in coming decades. That’s because it takes more energy and water to capture and store the emissions than it does at a regular coal plant.
As the article notes–with the exception of solar thermal power which uses the sun to heat up water in huge pipes–clean energy’s low water needs provide another selling point. Neither technology uses much water at all, except during the manufacturing process.
That could explain why Vestas, the world’s biggest maker of wind turbines, subtly changed its sales pitch in recent months. Now, the company touts wind power’s miserly use of water first, and its low-carbon electricity generation second.
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