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Saturday, October 25, 2008
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We're on an intermittently very slow and unreliable network at the Holiday Inn in Cortez. Posting may be slow this weekend.
9:16:35 AM 
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Best line from yesterday from a politician: "I thank you for the water, keep sending it down to Arizona. I will not renegotiate the Colorado River Compact. Colorado will keep its water, and that will not change." -- John McCain somewhere in Colorado yesterday, from Politico.
"2008 pres"
8:47:47 AM
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Population growth and energy development are both putting pressure on Colorado's remaining water. Here's a look at the water requirements for electrical generation from the New York Times From the article:
Scientific American has a thoughtful article this month about the trade-offs between energy and water. Many big power plants -- nuclear, coal, biomass and of course, hydroelectric -- use lots of water. Conversely, making water drinkable, and piping it into big cities, can require plenty of electricity. This potentially forces a choice between the two...
I spoke about the water-energy dilemma with Tim Farmer of Xcel Energy, a big Midwestern utility. Xcel is more than doubling the size of a coal plant near Pueblo, Colorado, by adding a low-water unit, called Comanche 3, that makes use of an air-cooled condenser, which helps to limit the amount of water needed to cool things down overall. "We live in a semi-arid climate in Eastern Colorado, and we have years where the drought is severe," said Mr. Farmer, who is the project director for the Comanche 3 unit. In 2002, he said, there was such a severe drought that Xcel was nearly forced to shut down its two existing Comanche units - prompting it to go to the low-water system for its expansion. The technology is expensive, however, and Mr. Farmer reckoned that building a low-water system can cost as much as three or four times that of an ordinary system, even if it uses just half the water. The higher price is due in large part to the cost of commodities in the air-cooling condenser. He knows of eight other systems that, like Comanche 3, that combine wet cooling with air-cooled condensers.
A number of other systems, with even more severe water restrictions, utilize the less-efficient method of "dry-cooling," which uses less than 10 percent of the water required for a wet-cooled plant, according to the World Nuclear Association, but consumes a lot of power with the use of large fans.
"cc"
8:37:27 AM
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© Copyright 2009 John Orr.
Last update: 3/15/09; 2:44:31 PM.
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