IEEE Special Report: Water vs. Energy

IEEE Spectrum, the flagship publication of IEEE – the world’s largest professional association dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence for the benefit of humanity – released a special report this week looking at…you guessed it: the water-energy nexus. Before you sigh at the news of yet another general report on the connections between water and energy, I recommend taking a look at the graphics and interesting factoids that IEEE has compiled.

Over the last couple years, we’ve seen similar “special” reports in Scientific American and most recently in the New York Times.

We’ve also seen reports from government and nonprofit groups that look at the water-energy nexus in specific states or regions including California, Colorado, the Great Lakes, the U.S. Southeast, Texas and Ontario. There have been some journal articles written on the subject, as well as a report for the world’s business community and a collection of abstracts and presentations from the 2009 Water-Energy Sustainability Symposium.

Each of these reports has added new insights and useful information to the discourse around the water-energy nexus, and IEEE’s Special Report: Water vs. Energy is no different. The special report consists of a series of articles describing different aspects of the water-energy nexus. Here's a list of the articles and media composing the special report:

• The Editor's Take (podcast): IEEE Spectrum's Editor in Chief Susan Hassler and Senior Editor Samuel K. Moore introduce the water-energy nexus.
• Where Water Meets the Watts: An awesome interactive map showing places around the world where water and energy are coming into conflict. Click on a specific location to learn the background of its water-energy conflict and some stats about per capita water and electricity use.
• In the American Southwest, the Energy Problem is Water: An article about how energy producers in the Southwest - particularly those along the Colorado River - are struggling to find the water necessary to generate electricity.
• Water and Shale Gas: An article about how new drilling techniques such as hydraulic fracturing have increased the amount of gas that's accessible in the U.S., but whether it's truly recoverable may hinge on whether concerns about drinking water contamination are addressed convincingly.
• The Future of Hydropower: An article about how climate change is disrupting water flows across the world, making it difficult for countries - 60 of which get more than half their electricity from hydro - to predict how much hydropower will be availabile in the future.
• The Water Cost of Carbon Capture: An article about so-called "clean-coal" technologies and how capturing carbon at coal-fired power plants nearly doubles the already huge water demands of coal power production.
• China Rewires its Rivers (map): A map and accompanying article that show how China has redirected and diverted many of their rivers, hauling water hundreds of miles to quench the thirst the country's growing urban populations. With 44% of China's population located in the North where only 14% of the country's water is available, it looks like China has created a mirror image of California's energy guzzling water supply system.
• CO2 vs. H2O in Power Production: A colorful graph that plots out the water consumption and carbon emissions of different electric power sources, allowing you to compare the tradeoffs of different clean and traditional sources of electricity.
• Australia's Drought Busting Water Grid: An article exploring how farmers and water managers in the drought-stricken region of New South Whales, Australia are using water markets and a integrated water grid to help grapple with dire water scarcity and the rapidly increasing energy costs of delivering water.
• Biofuels Water Problem: An article looking into biofuel production and the disastrous water supply issues associated with producing biofuels from irrigated crops. At present, less than 20% of corn grown in the U.S. is irrigated but increases in corn production seem to be occurring in areas where irrigation is common.
• Pumping Punjab Dry: An article that describes how state-sponsored energy subsidies have enabled farmers in India to pump groundwater at virtually no cost which has resulted in overdrawn aquifers that threaten the future of farming in India's historic breadbasket.
• Singapore's Water Cycle Wizardry: An article describing Singapore's extensive and highly successful wastewater reuse program that sends NEWater to happy customers across the island nation.
• Eight Technologies for Drinkable Seawater: Seawater desalination is a promising technology for creating new water supplies, but the massive amounts of energy required to create freshwater from the oceans currently hinders its development. This article describes the pros and cons of a handful of current and emerging seawater desalination technologies.
• Malta's Smart Grid Solution: This article describes the world's first multiutility grid being installed in the Mediterranean nation of Malta, where planners hope an integrated water and energy smart grid will help reduce demand for both water and energy.
• DIY: Replacing the Water Grid with Rainwater (video): This short video shows you how a Maltese man became water self-sufficient by harvesting rainwater on his property and storing it in cisterns.
• Powered by Crazy: An article looking at a handful of innovative ideas that could one day address our water and energy challenges.

While I haven’t read every article just yet, the one’s I have read were quite fascinating, each doing an excellent job providing examples and context for all the big numbers that commonly get thrown around while talking about the water-energy nexus. For instance, in The Coming Clash Between Water and Energy, which gives a general overview if the water-energy nexus, we get two interesting ways to help people relate to the water it takes to provide energy and the energy it takes to provide water (emphasis added):

In the United States alone, on just one average day, more than 500 billion liters of freshwater travel through the country’s power plants—more than twice what flows through the Nile.

Look at it another way. Robert Osborne, an enterprising water blogger, calculates that a single Google search takes about half a milliliter of water. Just a few drops, really. But the 300 million searches we do a day take 150 000 liters. That’s a thousand bathtubs of water to power the data centers that handle the world’s idle curiosity. We challenge you to find an activity more trivial than a search engine query.

With that much water needed for even the most trifling tasks, the natural question becomes: How does that water reach those data centers, let alone the world’s farms and factories? By using energy, of course.

We burn through entire power plants’ worth of output to move water from one river—the Colorado—to bring deserts into bloom. On India’s rice paddies, gigawatts of subsidized electricity have fueled an agricultural bonanza but have also induced farmers to pump the groundwater almost down to zero.

I really like the statement that more than twice the flow of the Nile River is used by power plants in the United States since most people – myself included – lose their frame of reference they hear numbers in the hundreds of billions.*

I also liked an article in the series called Singapore’s Water Cycle Wizadry, which looks at how the island nation of Singapore has been able to secure a stable water supply and significant energy and cost savings through wastewater recycling. Perhaps the biggest key to Singapore’s success was their ability to properly market the recycled wastewater and win over the public. The savvy marketing campaign is probably best exemplified in the name the water utility gave Singapore’s rechristened wastewater, “NEWater.” By creating an image of “sparkling newness” - and by having politicians drinking from bottles of NEWater at big civic events - the public became more comfortable with the idea of drinking treated sewage and even began to view the act as patriotic. You can actually by bottles of Singapore’s highly treated, essentially pristine water here in the United States, although bottling and shipping that water all this way requires massive amounts of energy that more than negate the energy benefits that Singapore reaps from using treated wastewater instead of desalinated seawater.

Of course, the idea of direct potable wastewater reuse shouldn’t be so hard to accept since most communities get their water downstream of somebody else. Indeed, as the article points out it has been estimated that every drop of water in the Colorado River is used 17 times before reaching (or not) the sea. But I digress.

One of the main lessons from Singapore is that communities currently considering seawater desalination to meet their water needs should turn to water reuse instead. Not only is reuse the environmentally preferable option, but it is also the most fiscally responsible given the high energy costs of desalination. As the article describes:

To remove salt from seawater, Seah says the treatment plant must apply a pressure of about 7 megapascals. To remove impurities from wastewater, he requires less than 1 MPa. That translates directly into the energy cost for the whole plant—more than 4 kilowatt-hours per thousand liters of water for seawater desalination, versus 0.7 kWh for NEWater. "It’s a no-brainer," says Seah, and his eyes crinkle into a laugh. "Win, win, win!" he says.
…
In Singapore’s case, the deliberate reuse of water has played a prominent role in the country’s development. Seetharam Kallidaikurichi is the director of the Institute of Water Policy at the National University of Singapore, and he argues that Singapore’s water strategy has been the foundation of the country’s economic success in the last 45 years. "The evidence is beginning to emerge," he says, "that it’s not water among many other things but water as central, the key to unlocking the vicious cycles of deprivation and poverty into economic success and a good quality of life."

Other interesting article I browsed in the series included Malta’s Smart Grid Solution, about how Malta, “this tiny nation of 400 000, a seven-island archipelago strung between Italy and Tunisia, IBM is building the world’s first smart grid that will govern both electricity and water.” And Powered By Crazy a survey of 10 ideas for tackling our water and energy challenges that are “so crazy they just might work.”

Check out IEEE’s Special Report: Water vs. Energy.

Hattip to Ed Cleary from the WaterSpot for telling me about the special report

*To make sure the Nile River factoid passes the laugh test – and to cover my rear if I go out repeating it – I did some back of the envelope calculations. According to the USGS about 143 billion gallons of freshwater are used by thermoelectric power plants each day in the U.S., or 540 billion liters per day. This equates to about 1.7 million gallons of freshwater used by thermoelectric power plants per second (143,000,000,000/24hrs/60min/60sec). According to Wikipedia, the average volume of water discharging from the Nile is 99,941 cubic feet per second – or 747,610 gallons per second – which means that power plants use about 2.2 times more water than what flows through the Nile!