Tide of awareness about the water-energy relationship

Save water by using less electricity
Governments recognise that the two are fundamentally linked
By Grace Chua, The Straits Times, Saturday, July 9, 2011

‘Think of water as a fuel… When you fill your car with petrol, you don’t pour some on the ground and then put some in your car. You don’t waste it.’

Mr Dan McCarthy, head of Black & Veatch’s global water business

A SINGLE search-engine query, such as asking Google for the address of a restaurant or spa, consumes a tenth of a teaspoon of water.

Not literally and directly, but in the electricity needed to run the computers and servers involved.

When electricity is produced, the power plant consumes water for cooling, and some of this evaporates.

And there are 293 million Google searches – guzzling more than 1 million litres of such virtual water – each day.

A United States civil engineer, Mr Robert Osborne, has worked out the mathematics. The specific numbers can be debated, but more governments, firms and people are beginning to recognise that water consumption and energy use are fundamentally linked.