Energy industry

A veteran water engineer was recently approached by a reporter and asked to summarize the state of water in the United States. “Where is water going?” the young reporter eagerly asked the veteran expert. The water engineer replied, dryly, “Downhill. Most of the time.” Metaphorically, and literally, water resources in the United States are in a state of decline. Freshwater supplies are under increasing stress due to the combined forces of climate change and more intensive land use. Droughts are dryer and longer, and storms, when they come, are more violent. In mountainous states like California, less and less precipitation falls in the form of snow (which steadily accumulates and slowly melts), and more falls as rain, which rushes down our rivers and out to sea. All this is made worse by burgeoning urbanization, which is replacing the amount of land that can absorb precipitation with more and more impermeable, man-made infrastructure. Stress on our water systems … [Read more...] about Creating More Sustainable Water Systems by Taking Lessons from the Energy Industry

Distributed energy, distributed water But hidden within this Gordian tangle of interdependence lies some important opportunities for the United States to use science and technology to stabilize and improve both our water and our energy networks. The technologies our country has developed to create and manage distributed energy generation and distributed energy storage can guide us to develop new technologies to create distributed water generation and distributed water storage. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which has a long history of innovation in energy technologies, has plunged into water research in recent years with precisely this framework in mind. For example, it is becoming increasingly clear that distributed energy generation through rooftop solar will fundamentally alter how we design and operate our electrical grid. Distributed electrical generation allows us to produce significant quantities of electricity, much of which we can use locally to offset demands from the … [Read more...] about Creating More Sustainable Water Systems by Taking Lessons from Energy Industry