3/21/2008

Water = Electricity

by Barbara Currier Bell

Most lists of tips for saving electricity don’t begin with “Put a brick or two in the tank of your toilet.” But that trick does work—especially in Milford.

Water consumption is related to electricity consumption in a number of ways. One is that water must be moved around a lot—from capture to usage to treatment to release—and the prime movers are pumps with electric motors. Second, a lot of water must be heated. Water heating actually demands more electricity than lighting. For instance, a hot water faucet uses as much electricity in 5 minutes as a 60-watt bulb does in 14 hours. Third (the other side of the coin), power plants themselves use huge quantities of water to produce electricity: small amounts directly—for cooling—or much larger amounts indirectly—for drilling, mining, manufacturing, transporting or otherwise acquiring fuel. “More freshwater is used to produce electricity than for any purpose other than farming”, says one expert. In a vicious cycle, power plants emit carbon dioxide that contributes to global climate change, which in turn makes the water supplies that the plants depend on more unstable, difficult (expensive) to manage, and so on around the cycle again, tightening the splice between these two lifelines for humanity: water and electricity.

The process, though dizzying, is easy enough to outline. Use less water, need less electricity, create less carbon dioxide, need less water. Actual numbers are quite surprising. The amount of electricity used in the U.S. each year to service water consumption is 300 billion kilowatt hours, which equals the electricity use of 28 million people. It’s estimated that if each American decreased water consumption by half a percent the U.S. would decrease per capita electricity use by 10-20 percent over a period of 10-20 years, and 75 percent over 50 years.

Why would this water/electricity downward ratchet work especially well in Milford? Look at the stakes. 1) Milford has to use more electricity to pump water through its system than an average city does, because of its sea-level geography and leaky sewers. 2) The percentage of Connecticut/Milford customers who use electricity for water heating is greater than the national average. 3) Milford is in southwest Connecticut, where electricity is pricey, giving a special impetus to any downward ratchet.

Unfortunately, though, the ratchet won’t happen if Milfordites don’t recognize the tie-in between water and electricity. Even environmentalists seldom connect the two. Besides, costs suggest the opposite: electricity is expensive; water is cheap. What if water were priced comparably to electricity? Yes, then Milford consumers would notice the connection: they’d be paying more for flushing than for cooling. (Twenty percent of a household’s water goes through the toilets, while 15 percent of its electricity runs the air-conditioning.) Better yet, what if Milfordites were offered a credit against their electric bills for every half percent of water they saved, per the figures mentioned earlier in this column? A lot of bricks would get wet.