Energy Policies Have Water and Other Hidden Costs
Huge demands on increasingly scarce water are a major hidden cost of a "business as usual" approach to American electricity generation that needs to be more fully understood by policymakers and the public, according to a new Synapse Energy Economics Inc. report prepared for the nonprofit and nonpartisan Civil Society Institute (CSI) and the Environmental Working Group (EWG).
The new analysis, "The Hidden Costs of Electricity: Comparing the Hidden Costs of Power Generation Fuels," is available online. Six fuels used to generate electricity --- biomass, coal, nuclear, natural gas, solar (photovoltaic and concentrating solar power), and wind (both onshore and offshore) – are analyzed in the following categories: water impacts, climate change impacts, air pollution impacts, planning and cost risk, subsidies and tax incentives, land impacts, and other impacts.
