Watering Light Bulbs

Water Used For Making Electricity

It takes me forever to read things of interest to me - the vertigo thing gets in the way. So, I just read this article from the August 2008 inssue of Mother Earth News titled The Intertwined Tale of Energy and Water

The authors are from Virginia Tech, and have crunched the numbers for how much water is needed in creating our electricty. They've even broken it down as to how much each energy source uses water with both high and low values. I've taken a median approach to come up with my numbers.

Making A Lightbulb

So then, I went on a search for how much energy it takes to actually produce a light bulb. Then I looked for both incandescent bulbs and CFLs. I haven't looked for LED's and doubt highly I'll find the numbers I'm looking for. It was difficult enough to find them for the first 2 light bulbs.
This gent took his numbers from a Dutch study , and I've taken many of my numbers from him - along with making a few more assumptions - LOL - scary, but in reality, it doesn't add up to much.

Where am I going with the and the title? Here it is: We don't think about the amount of water it takes to produce all of the little things in our lives. Nor do we think about the amount of water it takes to keep them running. Well, these two articles focus on the light bulb. The lowly light bulb.

Water For Energy

It takes 1600 gallons of water to produce 100 kWh of energy. Roughly. It depends on the energy source. However, for NYS, we'll go with 1600 since we have such a mix of energy sources. You can do your own figures.

A Light Bulb's Life Cycle

The Dutch study went through the entire life cycle of regular and CFL's - from production to disposal. The CFL takes far more energy - and thus water - to produce, but in the end, even if you only get half the life-expectancy the manufacturers claim it has, it takes only 1/4 of the energy.

The CFL - uses about 1974 gallons of water over its life (1000 hours).
The incandescent - uses about 960 gallons of water over it's life (125 hours)
At first blush, it looks like a no-brainer. Why are we switching to CFL's? Because you'll go through about 8 regular bulbs in that same socket that you could have the CFL. Even if you only went through 4, you're still using far more energy and WATER to create/use/dispose of that regular bulb, compared to the CFL.

It Adds Up

And why is this so important? Well, take a look at the number of light sockets you have in your house. Someone came up with an average of 30 per house. I think that's under estimated. I just did a mental list of our house - which is smallll - and came up with 42. If you have even that average of 30 (if all the bulbs blew at once, how many would it take for you to replace them all?), and if you only replaced 1/3 of them with CFL compared to standard bulbs, You'll be saving a huge chunk of water.

Granted, not every socket can take a CFL and not every light should have one. Short duration lighting is better left to incandescents - they last longer and actually use less energy when turned on for 4 minutes or less - compared to the CFL. But there are many throughout the house that can very effectively be changed to CFL's. 5 of the fixtures are already flourescent or CFL. 13 have been converted to CFL and the rest are very short duration use.

Those 18 CFLs are using 35,500 gallons of water.

In contrast, going with the 4:1 ratio since I have yet for a CFL to work as long as they say, incandescents that would be in those sockets would use 142,000 gallons of water. I'm guessing no one has ever figured this water use into how much an average household uses per day.

Further Reading On Our Water Problems

Here's an article that showing how we are putting ourselves into states of drought.
Here's one about Lake Superior shrinking. And no one really knows why. This might be part of the answer.

Mercury

And - a tidbit of an aside regarding mercury in CFL's - it doesn't match what is spewed out of power plants using coal (54% percent of our electricity is produced by coal, nationwide). The number? 48 tons of mercury per year from our coal electricity .

Cleaner Coal? Not for TN Town

500 Million Gallons of Sludge Flood Town
By Samira J. Simone,
CNN

(Dec. 24) -- A wall holding back 80 acres of sludge from a coal plant in central Tennessee broke this week, spilling more than 500 million gallons of waste into the surrounding area.
The sludge, a byproduct of ash from coal combustion, was contained at a retention site at the Tennessee Valley Authority's power plant in Kingston, about 40 miles east of Knoxville, agency officials said.

The retention wall breached early Monday, sending the sludge downhill and damaging 15 homes. All the residents were evacuated, and three homes were deemed uninhabitable, a TVA spokesman told CNN.

The plant sits on a tributary of the Tennessee River called the Clinch River.

"We deeply regret that a retention wall for ash containment at our Kingston Fossil Plant failed, resulting in an ash slide and damage to nearby homes," TVA said in a statement released Tuesday.

TVA spokesman Gil Francis told CNN that up to 400 acres of land had been coated by the sludge, a bigger area than the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Video footage from the areas affected by the TVA pond breach showed sludge as high as 6 feet, burying porches and garage doors. The slide also downed nearby power lines, though the TVA said power had been restored to the area.

Francis said Environmental Protection Agency officials were on the scene and estimated the cleanup could take four to six weeks.

Some of the goop spilled into the tributary, but preliminary water quality test show that the drinking water at a nearby treatment plant meets standards.

"I don't want to drink it. I doesn't look healthy to me," Jody Miles, who fishes in the Clinch River, told CNN affiliate WBIR. "Do you reckon they can bring all this life back that's going to die from all this mess?"

Still, there is the potential for more sludge to enter the water supply through waste runoff.

"We're taking steps to stabilize runoff from this incident," Francis said.

Although video from the scene shows dead fish on the banks of the tributary, he said that "in terms of toxicity, until an analysis comes in, you can't call it toxic."

One environmental attorney called that statement "irresponsible." The ash that gives sludge its thick, pudding-like consistency in this case is known as fly ash, which results from the combustion of coal.

Fly ash contains concentrated amounts of mercury, arsenic and benzine, said Chandra Taylor, staff attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center.

"These things are naturally occurring, but they concentrate in the burning process and the residual is more toxic than it starts," she told CNN.

Appalachian environmentalists compared the mess with another spill eight years ago in eastern Kentucky, where the bottom of a coal sludge impoundment owned by Massey Energy broke into an abandoned underground mine, oozing more than 300 million gallons of coal waste into tributaries.

The water supply for more than 25,000 residents was contaminated, and aquatic life in the area perished. It took months to clean up the spill.

"If the estimates are correct, this spill is one and a half times bigger," said Dave Cooper, an environmental advocate with the Mountaintop Removal Road Show, a traveling program that explains the effect of an extreme form of mining.

While the full scope of the TVA spill is being determined, coal critics are already concerned about its long-term effects.

Cleaning up the mess, which could fill nearly 800 Olympic-size swimming pools, could take months or years, Taylor said.

"We're very concerned about how long it's going to take" to clean the spill, she told CNN.
Cooper agreed, saying, "It's 4, 5 feet deep. How are you going to scoop it up? Where are you going to put it?"