Calif. panel advises no cooling seawater at new plants

[struggle4progress]

Staff and agencies
18 April, 2006

LOS ANGELES - California‘s State Lands Commission on Monday passed an advisory resolution saying that new power plant leases must not use seawater as a coolant or meet strict standards regarding seawater‘s use.

The commission‘s resolution, while not binding, hints that the state may be on the way to abolishing seawater to cool coastal power plants.

About 39 percent of the power generation capacity in California is from the 23 power plants that are cooled in a "once-through" process using seawater that is dumped back into the Pacific Ocean, bays and estuaries. And about 23 percent of the electricity used in California is produced by these seaside plants.

The warm water put back in the ocean retards the growth of kelp and eelgrass, which are both essential to sea life near shore. Also, fish are ingested to the plants where many are killed, according to the resolution passed on Monday. <snip>

http://www.newsone.ca/piercelandherald/stories/news-00177740.html

[skids]

1. CHP

Just an example of how much power we waste. We dump concentrated heat into the environment -- that's basically throwing it away. We could instead generate our electricity in the home and keep the heat. That's called "Combined Heat And Power" and you can read a bit about it here:

http://www.whispertech.co.nz/whispergen/

No it's not renewable, but it is a way to cut down on non-renewable energy waste.

[hunter]

2. The warm water of climate change is brutal.

Southern species are moving north, and I've noticed this change in my own lifetime. In the last sixty years mean ocean temperatures along the California coast have increased 1 degree F, and summer maximums have increased 4 degrees. The heat dumped by power plants is insignificant in the face of this change, except in the immediate vicinity of the outfalls.

The environmental damage done by the actual circulation of this cooling water is fairly well documented. It used to be a lot worse when all sorts of chemicals were run through these systems to keep them clear.

Abandoning the use of seawater cooling is expensive, but perhaps not prohibitively so. If this policy reduces the overall efficiency of power plants then the amount of carbon dioxide and other pollutants released into the atmosphere per kilowatt hour will increase.

I'm not optimistic about the use of natural gas in cogeneration schemes. We already import natural gas, and greater imports of natural gas especially in the form of LNG, or the use of Synthetic Natural Gas (SNG) made from coal are environmental dead ends.

The cooling system of the Diablo Canyon power plant is described in excruciating detail here:

http://www.sfei.org/camp/servlet/DisplayProgram?which=General&pid=NCCA0003751

[NNadir]

3. California is one of those rare places...

...where people think that the laws of thermodynamics can be legislated out of existence.

The ultimate effect of such legislation would simply most probably to increase the use of energy and the emissions of global climate gases leading to...higher temperatures.

Many rather elaborate cooling strategies using air exist, but they are both financially expensive, and involve buying and manufacturing lots of stuff.