Liv­ing in the hydro-rich Pacific North­west it is hard to imag­ine rationing show­ers and lawn water­ing in order to have a few hours a day of elec­tric­ity, but that is what is hap­pen­ing in Venezuela right now.

One of the sever­est droughts in decades has given Venezuela’s social­ist pres­i­dent a polit­i­cal night­mare as hydro-electrical power drib­bles to a stand­still, unleash­ing black­outs, rationing and protests. The waters behind the Guri dam, which sup­plies more than half the nation’s power, have touched per­ilously low levels.

Nev­er­the­less, with energy pro­duc­tion requir­ing as much water as agri­cul­ture and once mighty rivers like the Rio Grande no longer reach­ing the ocean and energy usage expected to grow beyond exist­ing capac­ity, unless we decen­tral­ize now, it will hap­pen here.

There are many rea­sons I focus upon wind energy, not the least being the ample supply…this from the Novem­ber 2009 Sci­en­tific American.

Plenty of Sup­ply
Today the max­i­mum power con­sumed world­wide at any given moment is about 12.5 tril­lion watts (ter­awatts, or TW), accord­ing to the U.S. Energy Infor­ma­tion Admin­is­tra­tion. The agency projects that in 2030 the world will require 16.9 TW of power as global pop­u­la­tion and liv­ing stan­dards rise, with about 2.8 TW in the
U.S. The mix of sources is sim­i­lar to today’s, heav­ily depen­dent on fos­sil fuels. If, how­ever, the planet were pow­ered entirely by WWS, with no fossil-fuel or bio­mass com­bus­tion, an intrigu­ing sav­ings would occur. Global power demand would be only 11.5 TW, and U.S. demand would be 1.8 TW. That decline occurs because, in most cases, elec­tri­fi­ca­tion is a more effi­cient way to use energy. For exam­ple, only 17 to 20 per­cent of the energy in gaso­line is used to move a vehi­cle (the rest is wasted as heat), whereas 75 to 86 per­cent of the elec­tric­ity deliv­ered to an elec­tric vehi­cle goes into motion.

Even if demand did rise to 16.9 TW, WWS sources could pro­vide far more power. Detailed stud­ies by us and oth­ers indi­cate that energy from the wind, world­wide, is about 1,700 TW

Another rea­son I favor wind is that wind is the only renew­able energy source that does not require any water dur­ing the pro­duc­tion of elec­tric­ity. Even solar requires mas­sive amounts of water when used in a cen­tral­ized system.

Accord­ing to the Amer­i­can Wind Energy Asso­ci­a­tion, to gen­er­ate one kilo­watt hour of elec­tric­ity from nuclear power 2.3 litres of water are needed. Coal requires 1.9 litres and oil con­sumes 1.6 litres…Some CSP tech­nol­ogy utilises rows of curved mir­rors focus heat onto a tube filled with oil which boils water to make steam, in turn spin­ning a tur­bine a tur­bine — this is called a trough sys­tem. Another uses reflec­tive mir­rors called heliostats to reflect and con­cen­trate sun­light onto liquid-filled tubes used to gen­er­ate steam and spin turbines.

In the case of trough tech­nol­ogy, the water foot­print is con­sid­er­able — around 3.6 litres per kilo­watt hour.

This video pro­duced in Eng­land shares the ben­e­fits of decen­tral­iz­ing even if still using fos­sil fuels.