Water consumption—another reason to hate coal-fired electrical generation

One would think that someone building up a brand new energy infrastructure would be seriously looking at previous attempts in order to avoid the same mistakes that were made in the past.  But since this is China, one would be wrong.  Not only is China installing more coal-fired electrical power plants, she is buying some of the most water-intensive designs and siting them in some of the most arid places on earth.

As the saying goes, "If you will not learn from the mistakes of others, eventually you must learn from you own."  And by the way, learning from your own mistakes is much more painful and expensive.

Water Demands of Coal-Fired Power Drying Up Northern China

The coal industry withdraws 15 percent of China's water, much of it in arid northern China

By Coco Liu and ClimateWire

SHANGHAI -- The world's biggest coal consumer now has a new incentive to take a cleaner energy path, as China's coal-fired power plants are drying up the country's already scarce water resources.

A report published today by Bloomberg New Energy Finance notes that the top five Chinese power generators -- China Huaneng Group, China Datang Corp., China Huadian Corp., China Guodian Corp. and China Power Investment Corp. -- have hundreds of gigawatts of coal-fired power plants in the country's dry north and that retrofitting them with water-efficient solutions could cost billions of dollars.

"Today, 85 percent of China's power generation capacity is located in water-scarce regions and 15 percent of this still relies on water-intensive, once-through cooling technologies," said Maxime Serrano Bardisa, one of the report's authors as well as Bloomberg New Energy Finance's water analyst.

At the same time, the nation is seeing less and less water. According to separate research by the China Environmental Forum, an initiative of the U.S.-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars' global sustainability and resilience program, China's total water reserves dropped 13 percent from 2000 to 2009, with the water shortage being particularly severe in the north.

The coal industry has played a big role in the shortage, the report says. Northern China has 20 percent of the country's freshwater supply, but its coal mining and coal-fired power generators are thirsty for water. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that in 2010 alone, the two sectors combined withdrew 98 billion cubic meters of fresh water across the region -- or nearly 15 percent of China's total freshwater withdrawals in the year.

If the five Chinese power giants continue their current development of coal-fired plants, the report predicts, the sector's water withdrawals will exceed 25 percent of China's 2030 target to cap its national water withdrawals at 700 billion cubic meters per year. Some Chinese regions have already extracted underground water faster than it is being replenished, and any increase in water withdrawals could further push China away from an environmentally sustainable future.

No easy solutions

There are solutions to ease the water stress, but each comes with major trade-offs.

For instance, if China's coal-fired power producers move their future buildup from the dry north to parts of the water-abundant south like Jiangxi and Fujian provinces, they will have less trouble with water use but more challenges to sell the electricity they produce, as those regions are not industrial hubs. And replacing coal-fired power plants' once-through cooling systems with water-saving solutions like air-cooled systems will decrease the plants' thermal efficiency and as a result increase greenhouse gas emissions, the report notes.

Fixes for this carry a high price tag. The report says that if Chinese policymakers were to force the retrofitting of existing once-through cooling systems, more than 100 gigawatts of coal-fired power plants would be affected at a cost of $20 billion -- not including the cost of a 10 GW reduction in power generation capacity due to lower efficiency. more