New WWA paper analyzes water use by power plants

WWA's Kristen Averyt and James Meldrum, along with collaborators at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and Synapse Energy Economics, recently completed an analysis of 2008 water use by electric power plants. Their findings demonstrated that approximately 41% of freshwater withdrawals and 3% of freshwater consumption across the country is attributable to power generation, usually for cooling purposes. The paper, published in Environmental Research Letters, also showed significant discrepancies between water use data collected by the Energy Information Administration and calculations done for this analysis. Averyt et al.'s paper is available here.