Kathy Jacobs, who managed water for twenty-three years in Arizona, is now leading an innovative thinktank drawing on three universities. The Arizona Water Institute just published a paper on the amount of water it takes to generate power in Arizona. A couple of interesting quotes:
On a national basis, the water withdrawn from rivers and other sources for use in electrical generating plants is now at parity with water withdrawn for irrigated agriculture.
Jacobs said that California uses about twenty percent of its total power to move, process, and treat water, and about thirty percent of its natural gas, much more than most states. She mentioned this report’s conclusion, that water and electricity are so “entangled” as to be almost indivisible in the planning process.
Jacobs encouraged us to look at this report, which points out that it takes so much water to generate power, especially nuclear and coal plant power, that when Arizona sells power to other states, mostly California, it is actually exporting the equivalent of huge amounts of water to those states – over fifty thousand acre feet annually.
Maybe not such a great idea for a desert community.
Kit Stolz 