New Power Plants to Dry Up Water Supplies?

  • The Kaskaskia River has been low lately because of lack of rain. But nearby power plants also draw a lot of water from the river... making residents who depend on the river nervous. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

The U.S. will need more electricity in the next few decades. To keep pace with demand, companies plan to build more power plants. Battles over power generation usually involve air quality or even how much fossil fuel is used to generate electricity. But one community’s facing a fight over how much water a new power plant might use. It’s a debate more of us might face in the future. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Shawn Allee reports:

Transcript

The U.S. will need more electricity in the next few decades. To keep pace with demand, companies plan to build more power plants. Battles over power generation usually involve air quality or even how much fossil fuel is used to generate electricity. But one community’s facing a fight over how much water a new power plant might use. It’s a debate more of us might face in the future. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Shawn Allee reports:


(sound of boat motor starting up)


A bearded guy by the name of Smitty is helping fisherman heave off from his riverside marina. On this sweltering afternoon, the marina’s hosting a big fishing tournament. The tournament’s bringing in lots of business, but Smitty’s got a problem. The area’s been hard up for rain recently, and the water’s pretty shallow.


“It makes quite a bit of difference. A lot of the access areas, the small river channels that lead into here aren’t accessible when the water gets low. It’d affect our business, mean a lot less people being able to use it.”


Smitty wonders whether there’s something else keeping this river, the Kaskaskia, shallow. Lately, he’s been asking whether a coal-fired power plant has been using too much river water. The Baldwin power plant, just east of the St. Louis metro area, is owned by Dynegy – a big power company.


Baldwin cools its generators with water from the Kaskaskia. Now another company, Peabody, is building its own power plant nearby. And that new plant will need river water to cool its generators, too.


Several environmental groups and local activists oppose the project. They say the Kaskaskia doesn’t have enough water for a new power plant. They say wildlife, boaters, and city drinking supplies already use the Kaskaskia. The Peabody Company says the plant won’t endanger the river’s water levels. The company will use the latest technology to conserve water.


But, even with hi-tech equipment, Peabody wanted to pump about 30 million gallons each day from the Kaskaskia. State regulators said no, and restricted the plant to 13 million gallons a day. That’s still about as much water as a town of 85,000 people uses, and only 10 percent of the water is ever returned to the river, the rest just evaporates.


Kathy Andria is with a local Sierra Club chapter. She says the project’s water needs are surprising, and worrisome.


“They have water battles out in the West. We haven’t had it before here, but this is really showing what’s in the future for us.”


Andria’s fears could apply not just to this river, but everywhere. The power industry’s already the biggest user of water in the United States, but it’s likely to need even more water soon. In the next few decades, electric companies plan to build at least 100 power plants that will need lots of water.


Right now, no one’s sure what will happen when they start drawing water from lakes, rivers and underground wells. In the meantime, the power industry is looking at ways to better use water.


Robert Goldstein is with the Electrical Power Research Institute, an industry research group. He says the industry’s improving systems that use no water at all, but those are very expensive. In the meantime, though, demands on water continue to rise. And Goldstein says the industry is aware that it has to compete for water.


“It’s not a question of how much water is there. It’s a question of how much water is there, versus what all the various stakeholders want to do with that water, what their aggregate demand is.”


He says even in regions that seem to have a lot of water, communities need to look closely at their future water needs. Goldstein says everyone, not just the power industry, will need to plan water use better.


People outside the industry are also watching how much water power plants use. Dr. Benedykt Dziegielewski is finishing a federal study on the subject. He worries about situations where several power plants draw from the same river or other water source at the same time.


“If you locate another plant, more water will be diverted from the system and at some point it will pre-empt other uses in the future from that same source.”


He says many areas could see more of these kinds of fights over water. Until we know more about demands for water, Dziegielewski says the industry should be as efficient as possible.


“As we go into the future, there is a need to control or reduce the amount of fresh water that is used for electricity generation.”


Environmentalists say that’s the least that can be done. They’re asking why coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants have been allowed to use so much water already. But not all power sources do.


Wind power and other alternatives use little, if any, water. A U.S. Department of Energy report recently made that point.


But given the political clout of the fossil fuel industry, it’s still easier and cheaper to generate power that needs lots of water.


For the GLRC, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Making Electricity From Grass

Low prices for corn and soybeans have led many Midwest farmers to look for a new crop to mix with their usual rotation. Some are turning to plants grown specifically for what’s called “biomass.” Biomass crops can be used as fuel. While research on biomass is in its infancy… one particular crop has caught the eye of researchers who say it would be perfect for Midwest power plants. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Shawn Johnson reports:

Transcript

Low prices for corn and soybeans have led many Midwest farmers to look for a new crop to mix
with their usual rotation. Some are turning to plants grown specifically for what’s called
“biomass.” Biomass crops can be used as fuel. While research on biomass is in its infancy… one
particular crop has caught the eye of researchers who say it would be perfect for Midwest power
plants. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium Shawn Johnson reports:


In a farm field not too far from the University of Illinois stands a small plot of miscanthus. The
wavy, 12-foot tall grass topped with fluffy, seedless flowers is native to some places in Europe,
where it’s catching on as a crop to burn. Researcher john clifton-brown of Trinity College in
Dublin, Ireland has grown miscanthus on his father’s farm for 12 years now. He says it’s a
natural fit for Illinois.


“You seem to have in Illinois superb soil. You seem to have very low corn prices. You have
rainfall. And these factors combined look like a golden opportunity for the development of
renewable energy from biomass crops like miscanthus.”


Miscanthus is giant grass that can be planted in the same fields that normally grow corn and
soybeans. The similarities pretty well stop there. Where most Midwest farmers are used to
growing crops that produce food, miscanthus is grown specifically to be chopped off, bailed, and
burned, usually with coal in coal-fired power plants.


John Caveny owns the land where this miscanthus plot is growing. He stops short of calling this
a new way of farming:


“Well, in way it is, in a way it isn’t. What all farmers do, when you get right down to it, is
advance the value of sunlight energy. That’s what you do, whether you grow tomatoes, whether
you grow flowers, whether you grow grass, whether you grow corn.”


In the case of growing miscanthus, the process is much different than that of most Midwest crops.
Farmers use multi-row planters pulled behind tractors to plant corn and soybeans. To grow
miscanthus, a producer needs to dig holes and plant sprigs of the grass one at a time to be
successful. The crop will grow back on its own year after year for up to 30 years, but it’s not big
enough to be harvested the first few years its in the ground. Even with all these complications,
University of Illinois researcher Steve Long says a farmer who’s willing to make an investment in
miscanthus can reap great rewards in the long run.

“You do need labor to put this into the ground, but then after that, this is considerably less labor
than corn or soybeans, and on current figures, it is more profitable.”


Those figures are more theory than reality at this point, because a market for miscanthus has yet
to emerge. Dynegy is the only power company that buys miscanthus in this part of Illinois. And
even dynegy won’t be ready to harvest biomass crops on a large scale for another five years. But
the energy company projects it could eventually pay 40 dollars per ton of dried… harvested
miscanthus. That’s pretty good money for the farmers. The reason dynegy will pay that much?
While it doesn’t burn as efficiently as coal… miscanthus emits far fewer pollutants. And while it
emits greenhouse gases such as CO-2 while it’s burning, it will recapture those gases when it
grows. As energy companies are forced to meet more and more environmental requirements,
Dynegy’s Chris Williams says miscanthus becomes appealing:


“It’s getting closer and closer to the cost of coal generation. And you look at that with the
environmental benefits of the biomass, it really makes sense to do the research now to get it into
production as soon as we can.”


Dynegy is looking for farmers to grow miscanthus within a 50-mile radius of one of its central
Illinois power plants. But the company doesn’t know how many farmers it will be able to find.
Even if enough farmers are interested, dynegy is still working out the specifics of harvesting,
shipping, and burning grass effectively.


Miscanthus and biomass crops such as corn for ethanol and soybeans for soy diesel are just part
of a growing renewable energy market. And they face plenty of competition. Hans Detweiller is
with the environmental law and policy center, which advocates renewable energy in the Midwest.
Detweiller says wind and solar power generation are simply more established than biomass right
now:


“Biomass energy has more questions I think in the minds of the public than some of the other
energy sources, but we would like to see more of it. Especially where you can get parallel
benefits such as increased water quality, increased wildlife habitat, things like that.”


Detweiller says miscanthus could fit that billing, but other biomass crops might be more suitable.
Depending upon who you talk to, fields of young aspen or willow trees could even be the biomass
crops of the future. And Detweiller says a native plant like switchgrass is an attractive option
because it does not grow nearly as thick as miscanthus allowing wildlife to forage more freely.


But it’s that thickness that researcher John Clifton brown says makes miscanthus so appealing
and potentially so profitable to a farmer. As he stands next to a wall of miscanthus, Clifton-
Brown says the crop he’s grown in Ireland for a dozen years will only perform better in America.

“So try it. Suck it and see as we say in Europe.”


Clifton-Brown’s miscanthus is harvested only once a year. Others biomass crops are chopped off
a few times. They each have slightly different growing seasons, but all have at least one thing in
common. They represent a future where the energy we mine today could eventually be mowed.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Shawn Johnson.