What the Water Energy Literature Suggests?

Water Energy Literature is a Interest in evaluating energy production impacts on water. Which has increased over the years, indicating by the growing literature on the water energy. While this is a positive sign at first glance. This reflects having a more water-cautious research community. The inconsistency between the methods used and the competition over developing and applying a ‘superior’ method of evaluation, limits the meaningful progress in this field. Consumptive water use, instream freshwater degradative use, in-stream freshwater consumptive use, off-stream freshwater degradative use. Offstream freshwater consumptive use, water productivity, withdrawal to availability (WTA) ratio, normalized water consumption. Water withdrawal footprint, water availability time-span, eco factor, water stress indicator, and characterization factor In theory. These metrics are valuable, complementary and informative.

However, the inconsistency in their interpretation and application has resulted in incomparable and sometimes contradictory results. We believe that consideration of the following caveats is necessary in the assessment of the impacts of energy production. on water resources using the available metrics and methods in the literature.

The energy’s water impact metrics have unique definitions and must not be used interchangeably. According to existing literature the community has mainly shown interest in assessing the amount of water withdrawn and consumed for energy production. while there has been less interest in the evaluation of the water quality and temperature effects of energy production.

Despite the fact that these effects can be quite significant. For example, in the assessment of the water footprint of the electricity sector in the US. It was found that an average kilowatt-hour of electricity in the US in 2009 required almost 159 liters (42 gallons) of water, more than 95%. Which was gray water footprint which is associated with the water quality effects of electricity production.

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