“Water is life.” That’s one of the first lines of a new documentary airing on PBS stations.
While the claim that we need water to live should come as a shock to no one, it’s basic truth, and the facts built upon it are eye-opening.
The documentary is “Thirst for Power,” and it’s based on a book by the same name by Michael Webber. Webber is the Sid Richardson Chair in the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the John J. McKetta Centennial Energy Chair in the department of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: When you first wrote the book, did you imagine yourself also a movie star?
Michael Webber: That was not quite in the plans, initially.
Really, the point was to help explain to people the importance of energy and water and how they’re interrelated. And it took years to write the book and then years to make, produce and now release the documentary.
And it’s really fun. And it is a global story with a lot of Texas anecdotes. So it’s a Texas story as well, but also features some personal elements of my family as we learn about energy and water together. So it was really fun. I didn’t really expect that, but it’s nice outcome.
Sometimes the academic gets sort of a narrator role, but you’re really a character in this movie.
It was fun. So I went to the south of France when I was 12 with my family. My father was a professor at UT, so the story starts to sound familiar. He did a sabbatical in France, went to Pont du Gard, this Roman aqueduct in the south of France, and I learned about water and water infrastructure, and it kind of hung with me.
And now I’m a professor teaching and studying some of the same topics, and we kind of repeated the story. My wife and I, we took our kids to the South of France to go see the Pont du Gard. And that’s how the story kind of takes off in the film.
And I understand you worked with some local filmmakers to make this all happen?
Absolutely, I mean, Austin’s got so much creative talent. The director of the film is Mat Hames and the producers are Alpheus Media. And it’s really great to work with a local company to tell a global story so well.
The Pont Du Gard bridge in France, as seen in “Thirst for Power.”
Courtesy Alpheus Media
Regular listeners probably know you a bit like I do. You’re the energy guy. And so while your book and this documentary are about water, it’s also about this other convenience we take sorely for granted in this modern world, which is energy.
Could you share a few statistics with our audience? A couple that struck me were about water agriculture and energy production.
Absolutely. So I’m an energy guy. I’m also a water guy. I’m really an energy water guy, and they’re really both important.
We need water for life and energy for quality of life and they are interconnected. So we use water for energy and energy for water, and that’s the part that’s surprising for many people: how much water we use for energy. We use water to grow corn for ethanol. We use it to spin turbines at hydroelectric dams. We use water to cool power plants.
So we use water for energy and we use energy for water to heat, pressurize, treat, chill, make ice, you name it, we use the energy for the water. So the supply chains for water depend on energy, and the supply chains for energy depend on water.
This interconnection means if you have a problem in one, you have problem in the other. It also means there’s opportunities. Conservation of one becomes conservation of the other, so let me give you some numbers.
About 10% or more of our energy just goes to the water system, to making water safe to drink and make it heated for our showers, to make steam for industry, and about another 40% or so is used just to cool power plants, so it’s incredible how much water we use for the energy system. So we’re using more water for energy than we use for agriculture or for cities. And that’s a surprise for a lot of people.
If we just take water heating in America, about three or four percent of our energy just goes to water heating. That means we use more energy to heat our water in America than Switzerland and Sweden use for all purposes combined. So we are using like multiple countries’ worth of energy to heat our water. And that doesn’t include all the other ways we use energy to treat it or make ice or pressurize it to get it to our homes.
Courtesy Alpheus Media
You seem to focus on the first steps of awareness and conservation. Is that good enough for now, or at least a good first step when it comes to ensuring resources for the future?
It’s a start.
I’m an educator. I believe in educating the students directly in the classroom here at the University of Texas, but also we create a bunch of resources for the general public. Actually, there’s a website, thirstforpower.com, that has a lot of free educational resources that we’ve made for people.
There’s also something we call Watt Watchers of Texas and Resourcefulness, a bunch of free websites, free materials to educate K through 12 students or the general public. So really want to educate people because that’s a start. And then we can start to think about solutions after that as well.
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I want to think a little bit about the way Texas was built, because you observe this in the documentary, in a lot of European cities, cities were built around rivers. And in Texas, not all of our cities look like that. How does our distance from water resource increase our challenges here moving forward?
I would argue, actually, in Texas, most of our cities are on rivers … Just about until you get to West Texas. So they’re either near the coastline, take like Houston or Corpus Christi…
I’m thinking like Amarillo.
Amarillo is above a big aquifer, but not really on a river. But if you take Dallas, Waco, Austin, San Antonio, all along I-35, that is the furthest navigable upstream position you could get year-round for rivers, and that’s why those cities are there.
And the availability of the river water will affect the future of these cities, but some of these locations further west, rural areas, they don’t have much water, and that will limit their growth, and we’ve seen that already. So Texas does have a water story as well.
Sometimes it’s not on the surface, sometimes it’s in the ground of the aquifer, you have to drill for it. As long as you have to drill for the water, if you want to get the water for hydraulic fracturing too, so you get competition for some of these resources.
But there is a Texas challenge in that we tend to go from epic droughts punctuated by biblical floods. So we go back and forth where we have too much water at the wrong time in the wrong place and too little water most of the time in most places. That’s the Texas story.
Well, and a lot of growth, right? And I wonder, there’s someone in the documentary who talks about it’s just a matter of when places run out of water. Do you see that for Texas in the near future?
We’ve already seen it.
There’s some cities that say “no more subdivisions because we don’t have the water.” We already have some small towns that have run out of water. They had to have it trucked in. So it’s a real crisis already when we have a big drought.
It will limit growth as we have more people and we have more industry and we more data centers and more crops, more livestock. We have a lot of living things and a lot of built things that want water. That will be a real stress for us.
And in Texas, we feel the water constraint before we feel the energy constraint. We’re an energy abundant state. But if we have water constraints, those will become energy constraints. And that’s part of the hidden story that a lot of people don’t realize.
Ancestral Pueblo cliff dwellings in New Mexico as seen in “Thirst for Power.”
Courtesy Alpheus Media
Well, as you point out in this documentary, Earth is this blue planet precisely because of all of our water. So beyond awareness and conservation, are you hopeful for the type of action that’s going to secure water and energy for the future?
I hope so. I think so. I tend to be an optimistic guy. I’m a techno-optimist. I’m believer in humans with the ability for us to come together to solve problems if we choose to do so. We have to choose to so, but then we can solve it.
This is a problem where there are a lot of solutions. Certainly, we can think about more water efficiency in the home, which will save a lot energy. And a lot more energy efficiency in home will save a lot water. If you want to save water, turn off the lights and if you want save energy, turn off the water. So, we have this benefit where you have this cross-cutting conservation and efficiency I think we can do it.
We also maybe don’t all need the same kind of bluegrass lawn that we used to plant. That’s really water intensive. We can think about reclaimed water, using water again. We can think about all the efficiencies throughout society. And I think with some changes in technologies and behaviors and some more awareness, we can get there for sure. And there are pathways that look really good for Texas.
Well, and that, as you mentioned, water conservation isn’t just turning off the faucet, it’s turning off the lights, right?
Turn off the lights, yeah. The electricity needs so much water for water cooling. So we use water to cool natural gas plants, coal plants, and nuclear power plants, and we have a lot of those in Texas.
And if you turn off the light, you save electricity. And if save electricity, you need a little less water cooling. And that water cooling can evaporate the water. So we have lot of water embedded in our light bulbs, which really isn’t obvious to people.
Coming May 20, 2025: Austin PBS is hosting a special one-night screening of “Thirst for Power” followed by a conversation with Webber, director Mat Hames, and a panel of leading experts.
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