September 20th, 2017
Via The Financial Times, a look at Brazil’s Itaipu dam and its treaty with Paraguay: Celso Villar Torino, the Brazilian superintendent of operations at the Itaipú mega-dam, beams as he shows off a series of plaques outside his office. We are talking in a building whose six storeys are dwarfed by the colossal dam’s 200m-high […]
Read more »Water-Energy Nexus in the Himalayas
August 8th, 2017
Via the Wilson Center’s New Security Beat, an article on The region at the base of the Himalayas faces difficult tradeoffs when allocating freshwater resources for energy production versus agricultural, industrial, and domestic uses. This is one of the most ecologically unstable areas on Earth, and weather patterns are becoming increasingly irregular. On one end of the spectrum, water shortages frequently […]
Read more »August 4th, 2017
Via the Houston Chronicle, a look at the watergy crisis in West Texas: A West Texas land baron and oilman is on the verge of pumping 5.4 million gallons of water a day from far under the desert mountains here and piping it 60 miles to the nation’s most bountiful oil field, the Permian Basin, […]
Read more »Down the Mighty Columbia River, A Power Struggle Looms
July 28th, 2017
Courtesy of The New York Times, an interesting look at the Trump administration’s proposal to sell off portions of a vast system that produces nearly half of the nation’s hydropower electricity: To ride down the Columbia River as the John Day Dam’s wall of concrete slowly fills the view from a tugboat is to see […]
Read more »July 26th, 2017
Via World Resources Institute, an article on how water shortages affect India’s power generation potential: India is making great strides to aggressively expand its renewable energy capacity. But the country’s power sector remains highly reliant on thermoelectric plants, with high demand for water for cooling. That means that droughts, like the one caused last year by weak […]
Read more »A Limiting Factor On Electricity Production In A Warming World? Water.
July 26th, 2017
Via Ars Technica, a report on the watergy nexus in the European Union: Unless you work at a coal, gas, or nuclear plant, you may not think about water when you think about electricity (certainly at a household level; they don’t mix). But water plays an important part in cooling many power plants, and many power […]
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