Abstract
Thermoelectric power production in the United States primarily relies on wet-cooled plants, which in turn require water below prescribed design temperatures, both for cooling and operational efficiency. Thus, power production in US remains particularly vulnerable to water scarcity and rising stream temperatures under climate change and variability. Previous studies on the climate-water-energy nexus have primarily focused on mid- to end-century horizons and have not considered the full range of uncertainty in climate projections. Technology managers and energy policy makers are increasingly interested in the decadal time scales to understand adaptation challenges and investment strategies. Here we develop a new approach that relies on a novel multivariate water stress index, which considers the joint probability of warmer and scarcer water, and computes uncertainties arising from climate model imperfections and intrinsic variability. Our assessments over contiguous US suggest consistent increase in water stress for power production with about 27% of the production severely impacted by 2030s.
Highlights
Thermoelectric power production in the United States primarily relies on wet-cooled plants, which in turn require water below prescribed design temperatures, both for cooling and operational efficiency
Future thermoelectric power production will depend on the availability of sufficient water resources, which will directly be impacted under climate change[6,13,21,22,23,24,25,26,27]
We study the concurrent effects of scarcer and warmer water to assess the vulnerability of thermoelectric power plants using a new dimensionless multivariate water stress index
Summary
Received: 18 April 2017 Accepted: 5 September 2017 Published online: 20 September 2017. Using hydrological (Variable Infiltration Capacity [VIC]) and one-dimensional stream temperature[33] models forced with outputs from global climate models (GCMs), Vliet et al.[24] showed the vulnerability of thermoelectric power production in the US and Europe for mid- and end-of-the century time horizons. Hydrological modeling of river flows and stream temperatures[33] at daily scale introduces additional uncertainty in their projections These studies[24,25] were focused on mid-to-end-of-the-century time horizons; insights derived at long-term may not be credible to develop adaptation strategies for near-term (0–30 years)[35,36] planning horizons. We study the concurrent effects of scarcer and warmer water to assess the vulnerability of thermoelectric power plants using a new dimensionless multivariate water stress index (see Methods). The index is motivated from the multivariate[42,43,44,45] characterization of droughts[46,47] and has been for the first time applied in the context of power production
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