Thirst for Power

Thirst for Power: Energy, Water, and Human Survival
by Michael E. Webber

Main Points:

• "Water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink" is the famous saying by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)
• Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Energy Institute at the UT-Austin
• Life is water and energy is wealth (quality of life).
• When NASA goes to look for life, they are looking for water. 
• Water- Societies have understood that control of water is the control of power
• No reason to go beyond 100k or 200k city systems without a water system
• 政治 or "policy" or "politics" have water radicals
• Cambodian empire built a water structure that looks like a temple
• Water enables life and civilization and droughts can eliminate societies
• Tang, Yuan, Ming dynasties of China collapsed due to drought. They found stalactites in caves in western China show us the mineral record and annual wetness for 1800 years. They compared the multi-decade droughts with written records of the Chinese and they correlated with collapse of the dynasties.
• Roman Empire collapsed due to German barbarians, lombards, visigoths, and invaders that might have come and left their homes due to drought on the fringes of the empire. 
• Maya collapse was coincident with drought, resulting in huge loss of life
• Energy- clean water, productive industry, mobility, physical transportation, IT, food
• Energy can be correlated with freedom and human rights
• Problems:
• Resource depletion
• Environmental Degredation
• National Security
• Rick Smalley was a Nobel Prize winner for discovering the C60 Buckyballs. He spent the last few years of his life talking about the top 10 challenges of society: (1) Energy, (2) Water (3) Food (4) Environment (5) Poverty...

• The Energy Water Nexus:
• Infinite energy enables infinite water, a constraint in one results in a constrain in the other
• Good news: cross-cutting solutions that benefit ones, benefits the other
• Water uses for power
• Hydroelectric Turbines
• Steam Turbines
• Cooling Power Plants
• Water uses for fuel
• Growing biofuels
• Extracting Oil and Gas
• Mining Coal/Uranium
• Refining/upgrading fuels
• Transporting Fuels- impacts energy supply chain
• Energy puts water at risk:
• Coal chemical and slurry spills
• Radiation contamination
• Mining Tails
• Thermal pollution (hot thermal power plants and cold dams)
• Oil spills
• Chemical Injection
• Water for Energy
• 1892- 16 Megawatt plant was the largest hydroelectric dam at the time in Austin, Texas
• 2000- 22 Gigawatt plant is the largest hydroelectric dam today is the Three Gorges Dam
• Reservoir of water is as long as Great Britain - tilted the Earth on its axis and slows it down by 0.06 microseconds and caused several earthquakes.
• 1/3 of all energy consumption is to just make steam at power plants. 
• 1/2 of all USA water withdrawals are to cool power plants - withdrawing the water to cool the power plants and to return it to the system. Risk of river impacts.
• Interesting fact: the typical American uses 150 gallons of water per person per day, but you may use another 300-600 gallons of water per day to cool the power plants to make the electricity at home. You are using more water in your electricity than in your water.
• Map of US with shale basins and these overlap with places with extensive drought
• Costs
• $0.50/bbl
• $2/bbl for transportation
• Energy for Water:
• Water is responsible for more than 12% of national energy consumption (heating, chilling, cooling, and transporting). This is twice as much energy as we spend on lightbulbs. One third of this is water heating. 
• Hydrologic cycle - 97.5% is saltwater, 2% is freshwater
• Wrong place: top of mountain or far away place
• Timing: in India all water comes during one monsoon month
• Mythology:
• The world "tantalize" has roots in Greek mythology. Tantalus was a greek figure that was punished by the Greek gods to have eternal thirst and surrounded by freshwater. But every time he tried to drink, the water recedes away from him. 
• Women:
• Piped water systems liberate women from pumping water by hand and carrying it back to the home. The image of poverty still remains to be this one.
• Constraints:
• Energy constraints: Power went out, so water cleanliness is not guaranteed. 
• 4 million women and children die prematurely each year due to burning primitive energy sources to heat up water from primitive sources. 
• Water constraints: 2003 heat wave in France causes hotter water than normal. Because of a heatwave the air conditioner power demand was higher. French power fleet couldn't get coolant from the river for their nuclear power plants because the water was higher than normal. On the other hand, in Texas they had a deep freeze and they don't weatherize their power plants. Water lines at the coal plants froze and tripped off the power (losing 2 Gigawatts), so natural gas plants cannot come on, so natural gas pipeline pressure is low. They had rolling blackouts because everyone wanted natural gas to heat their homes.
• Too much water- Nebraska nuclear power plant was flooded. 
• Too little water- 620 million people in India lost power. Drought caused farmers to use electric pumps to irrigate the farms, demand for power went up and there was less power supply because water levels in the dam went down. 
• Trends:
• Population growth
• Economic growth
• Climate Change
• "Whiskey is for drinking, water is worth fighting for" - Midwest proverb
• Conflicts:
• Israeli-Palestinian conflict : water inequity, "there is no peace without water."
• Syrian refugee: bankrupted farmers move to the cities and large unemployment 
• India-Pakistan tensions: "Blood and water cannot flow simultaneously"- Modi, and the Indus river has been the center of tensions for centuries.
• Solutions:
• Source switching- energy sources that are water lean
• Enhanced technologies- smart sensors and optimization
• Cross sectoral technologies- integrate systems so that they prop each other up
• Main Problem: Decarbonize while increasing water intensity- want clean and lean
• Wind and Solar
• Natural Gas combined cycle
• Coal with carbon capture
• Small modular reactors with dry cooling
• Wastewater as a Resource
• Toilet-To-Tap: Singapore does this for 20% of their freshwater
• Cheaper to treat than to desalinate seawater
• Showers to Flower: greywater for snowmaking and irrigating
• "Where the affluent meet the effluent"
• Policy Solutions:
• May 1961, the call for the space race
• April 1961, JFK makes a call around water and desalinating seawater
• What about population?
• The ways to deal with population are through urbanization and education. As societies urbanize, populations go down and as women are educated, populations go down. Energy and water lead to urbanization. 
• Renewables have been backed up by gas generation. Are there places where gas has not been permitted due to limits in water?
• ERCOT has had the biggest wind boom in the world and lead the nation in wind power. It is strongest at night in March and least in August afternoons. People were afraid due to the variability. Now they have 18 Gigawatts of wind power. Cost to regulate and manage the grid has gone down with time because at the same time they revised the markets to be smarter and more dynamic. Cost of power and cost of management of power went down. What happens when you go from 20% capacity of wind to 50% capacity? By building wind in large spaces the variability goes down due to geographic spread and temporal spread. No need to build up as much backup. Solar is different and demand moves more in unison, so this would require backup. 
• How do we design systems where water and energy systems prop each other up?
• Water is used to crack the shale open via hydraulic fracking. The shale flares excess gas. At those oil production sites you have nasty wastewater. You can use that flare gas to treat the salty water rather than wasting it. 

Listen to Professor Webber highlight some of the book's key points in his talk at Google!

Checkout the New York Times Magazine special article on global warming/climate science from 1979-1989 in their article "Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change."