By Patrick O’Grady | Phoenix Business Journal
Arizona seems to always have an abundance of cheap power and cheap water. When California has gone through rolling blackouts and water restrictions, the Valley and the state kept plugging along without a problem.
However, that’s probably going to change, at least according to a recent report from the Union of Concerned Scientists called “Water-Smart Power: Strengthening the U.S. Electricity System in a Warming World.”
The study looks at how power producers use water, and what they’ll have to do in the future with a hotter, dryer Arizona.
Kristen Averyt is the director of the Western Water Assessment and the associate director for Science at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado. Her work was used by the UCS, and it showed that power and water always is intertwined.
The challenge these days, with seemingly seismic shifts in how power is produced as utilities move away from coal and embrace cheap natural gas as well as look at renewables, is to look at how water will factor in to power production in the future, Averyt said.
