Publication date: 11/03/2007

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Report looks at where we get our water and how we use it

Did you know that 48 percent of the total supply of water we use every day is consumed by the nation's thermoelectric power plants?

Living in the Great Lakes state, anytime something about water crosses my desk, I take a look.

The information about power plant water usage was included in a publication called the "Your Home" newsletter from Criterium Engineers, (800) 242-1969, www.criterium-engineers.com.

This particular issue was crammed with water-use facts gathered by company president, H. Alan Mooney from the American Ground Water Trust, the Environmental Protection Agency and the American Water Works Association.

Before I pass on information to you, I check out the sources. Criterium is a consortium of Professional Engineers and Registered Architects that do residential and commercial building evaluations and have 70 offices nationwide. Their Michigan office is Criterium-Jones Engineering, (248) 433-5540, in Birmingham.

While on their Web site I found two treasure troves of information you should check out. The first, 100-plus questions before buying a home, is a must for anyone thinking about buying a house. The free form lets you compare up to three houses. By the time a buyer finishes the form, he or she, would know more about the houses than their present owners.

The second is a four-part series of articles on "Why can't we build the perfect house?" When you consider that the writer is a professional engineer (Mooney) whose company has evaluated more than 500,000 buildings throughout the U.S. and Canada, you have to believe he knows what he's talking about. If the state of our present housing supply bugs you, I recommend that you read the articles.

Now to the water facts that sparked this article. Did you know that the average person consumes about 16,000 gallons of water a lifetime? During normal activity, 35 percent of that water is consumed by our kidneys, 45 percent is exhaled through our lungs and 20 percent is lost to perspiration.

About 130 million people (almost 50 percent) in the U.S. get their water from groundwater. Forty million get their water from individual (not community) wells. The top five states with the most private wells are New York, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida and Michigan. Eighty-five percent of us get our water using one of the nation's 160,000 public water systems.

I found the water usage facts that follow so amazing that I double-checked them using U.S. Geological Survey ( www.usgs.gov) figures. I also localized the information by consulting "Water Withdrawals for Thermoelectric Power Generation in Michigan 2004." If you want to read this report just Google-search the title.

Based on 2000 U.S.G.S. data, we use 408 billion gallons of water a day. Forty-eight percent or 195 billion gallons of that is used by thermoelectric plants. Irrigation uses 35 percent (40 percent of the fresh water), industry uses 5 percent and the public (you and me) uses 11 percent.

Total water withdrawals have more than doubled in the last 50 years, from 180 billion gallons per day in 1950 to 408 billion gallons in 2000. Thermoelectric power plant usage went up almost five-fold -- from 40 billion gallons per day in 1950 to 195 billion gallons in 2000.

Thermoelectric plants use water for cooling. There are two cooling methods: once-through and closed-loop. Once-through uses the water for cooling, lets it cool and returns it to the environment. Closed-loop uses far less water because it is re-circulated. However, much of that water is used up in the process and not returned to the environment.

In 2000, Michiganians used 7.7 billion gallons of fresh water each day in thermoelectric power plants. The water wasn't re-circulated.

Nationwide, over the last 50 years, the average gallons of water used to produce the same amount of electricity decreased dramatically. Water needed to produce one kilowatt-hour of electricity decreased from 63 gal/kWh in 1950 to 21 gal/kWh in 2000.

That sounds wonderful, but remember that at the same time these plants are getting more efficient, the amount of water used by thermoelectric plants increased five times.

We are told that nuclear power plants with their vast water-cooled towers are the wave of the future.

I am a million miles away from being an expert but I know that the Great Lakes basin is already overstressed and many of the growth-areas of the country have limited water supplies. If thermoelectric plants are already using 48 percent of the available water supply, we had better make very certain that we know where the necessary water is going to come from before expanding the this technology.

Note: This article was accurate at the date of publication. However, information contained in it may have changed. If you plan to use the information contained herein for any purpose, verification of its continued accuracy is your responsibility.

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