Tag Archives: Water

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Journalists to Officials: Quit Stonewalling on W.VA. Water Crisis

The Society of Environmental Journalists called on EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and other federal and state officials yesterday to stop stonewalling about the facts of the recent chemical spill in West Virginia.

Tanks owned by Freedom Industries, where a chemical spill contaminated the drinking water in Charleston, West Virgina.

Chemical tanks owned by Freedom Industries, where a spill contaminated the drinking water in Charleston, West Virgina. (Google Earth)

“During crises like these,” the news organization wrote, “it is the job of the news media to seek reliable answers for the public and hold government agencies accountable. It is a time when the government agencies responsible for health and safety need to be active, open, transparent, and available to answer public and news media questions. From the beginning of the West Virginia emergency, government agencies seemed to be evading the news media, and by extension the public.”

[Disclosure: I’m a long-time member of SEJ.]

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New Report Links Water, Electrical Generation in Western States

Click on image to go to the report

The most important natural resource for generating electricity in the United States isn’t coal, natural gas, or uranium.

It’s water.

All of these fuels (and solar power, too) rely on water as a coolant, consuming massive quantities of a precious resource that is dwindling in many parts of the Southwest. Climate change means even less water in the future for the arid lands of the West — while energy consumption continues to grow.

[Water is also used in other parts of the energy cycle. For example, an average of 3 million gallons of water are used per natural gas well in the controversial “fracking” process — the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary, Gasland.]

According to a new study, “Every Drop Counts: Valuing the Water Used to Generate Electricity,” by Western Resource Advocates, electrical power plants in six Western states — Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — used a staggering 129 billion gallons of water in 2005.

As the report points out, such intensive use of water “impact(s) our region’s rivers and aquifers, and tie(s) up water that could meet growing urban, agricultural, or environmental needs.”

There’s a growing awareness of the Water/Energy Nexus — at least among researchers, environmental organizations and within the power industry itself. “Every Drop Counts” is a welcome addition to the literature on one of the nation’s most pressing — and least reported — issues.

From "Every Drop Counts," Executive Summary.

The report makes an important distinction between three usually interchangeable terms: Value, cost, and price.

  • Value - the amount that the user is willing to pay for it.
  • Cost - the cost of delivering water for a particular use.
  • Price - the amount users actually pay.

The price of water is typically far below the value, the authors note, because of subsidies and related political decisions.

The report includes a state-by-state analysis of water and energy policies for each of the six Western states. In Arizona, for example, the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) under the leadership of Chair Kris Mayes helped lead the Western states in factoring water into the electrical utility equation. (Mayes was recently term-limited off the ACC. Early indications from the new commissioners suggest that the ACC may forfeit many of the gains made under Mayes.)

In 2005, as part of a settlement on a rate-making case, the ACC ordered Arizona Public Service (APS) to consider the feasibility of expanding utility-scale solar generation at existing coal-fired power plants, noting the environmental benefits of potential water savings associated with solar generation.

The report also praises the state’s largest utility, APS, for its water policies. In 2009, the utility began reporting how much water was consumed by its electrical generation. The APS nuclear power plant at Palo Verde (the largest in the nation) uses only recycled water.

“Every Drop Counts” — which could also be titled “Count Every Drop” — may be a bit wonkish for the average reader. That said, the report will help Western residents make sense of their utility bills and give them the information they need to lobby for responsible, positive change.

For more on this issue, see:

Website: Circle of Blue

Reports:

Reducing Water Consumption of Concentrating Solar Power Electricity Generation (Report to Congress, DOE)

Energy Demands on Water Resources (Report to Congress, DOE)

Overview of the Water-Energy Nexus in the United States (National Conference of State Legislatures)

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Self-Cleaning Solar Panels: More from NASA’s Lab

Commercial solar cells with dust shields in NASA lab (Photo by Dr. Carlos Calle)

Following up on Monday’s story on self-cleaning solar panels, I contacted Dr. Carlos Calle, senior research scientist at NASA’s Electrostatics and Surface Physics Laboratory at the Kennedy Space Center, where the work originated. Calle was lead author of a fascinating 2009 technical article ($) on adapting the extra-terrestrial dust removal technology for solar panels here on Earth (and on the moon which has extremely fine dust particles).

The technology uses strategically placed electrodes to generate a electromagnetic wave that first lifts sunlight-blocking dust particles off the surface of the solar panel and then carries them away from the panel.

NASA's Dr. Carlos Calle

Calle’s lab made a variety dust shields, some rigid and opaque, some flexible and transparent. These were placed on top of off-the-shelf solar panels squares measuring two inches on each side. The test square were then covered with fine dust particles (roughly the size of the width of a human hair). In the journal article, Calle reports that “the transparent dust shields applied to commercial solar panels operate successfully under high vacuum even under extreme dust loading conditions that caused the solar cell performance to drop to 11-23%” of its normal output.

In fact, only the dustiest test cell (11% of normal performance) failed to reach 98.4% of normal output after the dust shield was activated. One panel (20.3% of normal) regained 99.4% of its electrical output after the dust curtain was energized.

I asked Calle if he thought water would still be needed to augment the dust shields. He was confident that the technology would “eliminate the need for water cleaning of solar panels.”

At this stage, Calle isn’t ready to speculate on how much the dust shields will add to the cost of a PV panel. However, given the simplicity of the design, the fact that so little power is needed to remove nearly all the dust, and the money saved by not using water in a desert, the dust shields will likely be attractive to manufactures, rooftop installers and utilities building large-scale solar PV projects in the desert.