2020 Thermoelectric Consumptive Water Use by Fuel Type

The lower 48 United States use a total of about 60,000 million gallons of freshwater per day in the process of thermoelectric power production (https://usgs.water.gov/vizlab/water-availability). About 4% of the water is lost to evaporation from cooling towers in a process called “consumptive water use.” This data visualization shows the amount of consumptive water use from thermoelectric power plants in 2020 by fuel type. In addition to showing total consumptive water use by fuel with the height of the tower-like bars, each evaporative water bubble is scaled to the amount of consumptive water use from an individual thermoelectric power plant. The data are all publicly available data (https://doi.org/10.5066/P9ZE2FVM).