Water required for electrical generation

Water is already a constraint in some places. The French thought they might hit that constraint in last year's drought. The managed it well enough. Apparently they hit a similar constraint in a 1991 drought. A link mentioning the 1991 drought is: http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/regional/116.htm

 

Low river flow in the Tennessee River reduced the Brown's Ferry nuclear power plant power output a couple of years ago during our last drought. They could not release the heated water because it would exceed the temperature limits allowed to be returned to the river.

This is the same Brown's Ferry that had a water cooling tower burn down. Then about 20 years ago, someone was checking the air integrity of a control cable tunnel with a candle and set it on fire ... isolating the control room from one of the reactors ("Switch to manual backup Scotty!")

Bob Wilson

 

Long term water management is a very big concern even here in the Pacific NW. no one is really familiar with how changing climates will affect precipitation here. We have hydro power (small ones in the Olympics) both East and West of me (larger ones thru out the Cascades) i have very little concern about rainfall to the West (the ocean should take care of that...hopefully keeping in mind nothing is guaranteed) but the East is another story.

not sure we can do much more with the Cascades end but the Olympics is largely untouched. being the only national rain forest down here means that large development projects will hit a lot of opposition. with that in mind, WA has now become the 2nd largest wind power producer in the country with many more sites coming on line in the near future.

i think we need to do much more with solar but not sure how we are going to get the momentum to get it done. right now, WA offers amazing incentives for solar that greatly reduces the payback period but despite the great deal, it is not really catching on.

a more recent development that has too early to determine its viability is a leasing program that eliminates the huge upfront costs but still provides the solar benefits. the pay back period is actually nearly double the purchased option but allows people who dont have the big bank balance to get into the solar game

 

Linden Co-generation Plant is a 760 MW (big) natural gas power plant located smack dab on the New Jersey Turnpike in North Jersey. If you know it is there, you can see it easily from your car. If you do not know it is there, you will not "see" it because air cooling (not water) is used.

For me the Linden plant is a prototype example of a power plant that I would accept in my back yard.

 

I read that factory farming uses a lot of water, so phasing it out should alleviate water shortages for some time.

 

anything that grows needs water, but that is also very relative. some crops actually have very good "calories per gallon" yields while other products (mostly beef and other livestock) do not.

keep in mind; a large portion of water used in growing plants can be recycled and reused which is something that is being investigated. implementing it economically is a challenge that can be overcome with the right resources devoted to the issue.

recovering waste water from livestock is another story completely

 

Irrigation method also plays a part in how much water is used.
Matching crops to the climate can help in terms of resource use. Most commercial tomato farms are in Florida for distribution reasons, but it is probably the worse state for actually growing the plants.

 

...another option is "gray" water which is treated municipal wastewater.
Not sure what the latest trend is on that, but we had one power plant project proposing to use that years ago.
Actually the power plant was not asking for it, but the township that had the wastewater wanted to offer it.
I was a critic of the idea, not because it might not be a good idea in theory, but I was challenging the township had not thought out the proper procedures and risk assessment (heavy chlorine treatment etc). I was also arguing the river needed to get the water back - thinking air cooling was an option from the Linden case I dicussed above.

 

If the waste water was consider safe to dump back in the river, it should have been safe enough for the cooling system. Some plants are just sucking up river already. Unless there was a hold step for the water treatment that might be skipped. There is a town in Ca, IIRC, that uses treated gray water for fire hydrants and park ponds. The gray water might only be so in name only, and not any different than drinking water.

It can be possible to reduce the loss of cooling water from evaporation. That Linden plant is still using water. It's just a closed system like used in a car.

 

...I am out-of-date on gray water re-use, but generally in order to re-use the wastewater, it does need to be treated quite a bit more than for release to surface waters. I would tend to agree CA has good regulations/guidelines for gray water re-use, probably the best practice. The state I lived in 20-yrs ago, which is probably just a few miles from your house as the crow flies, did not really have any guidelines at the time the power plant was proposed. One brute-force approach is to give heavy chlorine treatment to the treated wastewater.

Interestingly, after 20-yrs on the drawing board, this nat gas power plant is apparently being built. Don't know if they decided to use the gray water or not, as I moved away a long time ago.

You are saying whereas the Linden plant is a Co-Gen some useful steam is generated inside pipes for the industry. But any other fossil fuel and nuke power plants would have water cooling towers for the waste heat removal. Air cooling is possible for nat gas, at least for part of the load. The Linden plant shows extreme high efficient use of energy by using all the heat, and the waste heat is removed by air cooling. Winner for me, but I am not generally offered to have a clean plant like that in my backyard.

 

I agree on air cooling being a winner, but it still uses miles of pipes filled with water to get the heat from the turbine to the condensers. No reason not to use properly treated gray water in them.

 

Its important that the california black outs were caused not just by bad deregulation, but also lack of water to run the hydro that did not have proper fossil fuel back up.

A state agency LCRA likely will be able to kill a proposed new coal power plant because it is claimed it uses too much water, it has already delayed its licensing. I expect this to happen more and more.

ccgt, wind, and solar are much less dependent on water than coal and hydro. Regions that use large quantities of coal and hydro need to look at risks. Most regions need grid improvements to support the new power mix. When I lived in california, I was shocked by some of the very wasteful agricultural practices. Many regions need to look at farming as it relates to climate change. The power structure is much less political than fixing agriculture.

 

PV solar requires no water, if you exclude the manufacturing process!

Icarus

 

I would say low water required. Other than manufacturing and maintained, most good PV installations are grid tied with fossil back up. There is water use involved. I would say in some circumstances because solar installation is so low (0.11% in the first 9 months of 2012 in the US from eia), it is a very low water user as no back up power actually has needed to be built.

 

I thought that country was building everything but natutal gas fast as possible - coal, wind, solar, nuclear, hydro.

 

Washing dust off panels is usually done with water. The core point is still very valid, but any power plant of any sort will have some water use.