Article: Preventing National Electricity-Water Crisis Areas in the United States

Benjamin K. Sovacool* and Kelly E. Sovacool**

Introduction

Imagine if, in 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt had been able to warn President-to-be Franklin D. Roosevelt about the "dust bowl" disaster of the 1930s, which left some 500,000 Americans homeless and destroyed tens of millions of acres of farmland. ¹ At the turn of the twentieth century, no one was able to predict that unfettered expansion of farming and destruction of timberland would eventually lead to a severe drought across the Great Plains of America - a region host to a human and ecological catastrophe. ²

This article argues that, in a fortuitous twist of fate, we are, in 2009, able to predict (with a reasonable deal of certainty) the likelihood of a similar ecological and human crisis over the next 26 years. That likely crisis stems from the convergence of three separate challenges - population growth, rising electricity demand, and drought. Conventional power plant additions in 2025 in some areas could threaten to cause massive shortages of water, while forced shutdowns could occur due to lack of water in others. ³ The article identifies the most severe locations of these shortages as 22 National Electricity-Water Crisis Areas. This article concludes that the tools needed to prevent these crises are clean power technologies in the form of energy efficiency, wind farms, and solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, and that the President of the United States should immediately issue an executive order to address electricity-water challenges.

Part I of the Article focuses on the electricity-water nexus, and how the existing electricity ...