E=H2O

Cleantech companies challenge an old formula.

Everyone learns in elementary school that energy and water are essential to sustaining and fueling life. In today’s fossil fuel-dependent economy, what’s becoming more apparent is how, when it comes to industrialized systems, water is an essential component to our energy system—you can’t have one without the other.

Electricity is second only to agriculture as the country’s biggest guzzler of water, with power production sucking up almost 40 percent of U.S. freshwater withdrawals. Meanwhile, moving, cleaning and storing water burns of a surprising amount of power: In California, almost 20 percent of the state’s electricity is used to heat, deliver and treat water, according to the California Energy Commission.

While California, which draws much of its water from the state’s northern mountains for use in its lower reaches, is an extreme case in many water-related matters, experts in both the public and private sectors are increasingly urging for a closer look at the connection between energy and water. Linking the two together is essential to the security of both, they say.

“Energy sucked focus away from water,” says Chris Spain, chief strategy officer of HydroPoint, a Petaluma, Calif.–based company that makes automated monitoring and control systems for irrigation. “But people are starting to understand the role water has. Virtually everything has water embedded somewhere in the supply chain and manufacturing process.”

But it goes the other way as well: Ninety-five percent of California’s energy-efficiency goals can be met through water efficiency, according to Mary Ann Dickenson, the former executive director of the California Urban Water Council.

In other parts of the United States, strains on energy and water are already auguring disruptions. In 2008, a drought in the Southeast threatened to shut down area nuclear power plants because of limited water for cooling. Meanwhile, power outages could hobble water treatment and distribution, according to University of Texas professor Michael Webber, in testimony he gave in front of the U.S. Senate in March 2009.