Technology:

The Water-Energy Nexus (Los Alamos National Laboratory's 1663 magazine)

Hoover Dam on the Colorado River

Water and energy resources are interdependent—using one requires the other. This presents a particular challenge in the American West, where energy demand continues to rise as water supply threatens to fall.

Energy production, broadly speaking, requires large quantities of water as well, and conversely, water usage requires large amounts of energy. Water is needed to cool thermoelectric power plants—coal, nuclear, gas, or concentrated solar thermal—and extract fossil fuels from the ground. Energy is needed for water treatment and distribution to agricultural, industrial, and residential customers. The full interdependence is a complicated one, often with a compounding effect, but the bottom line is this: any strain on either resource, water or energy, produces a corresponding strain on the other.

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