A building’s cooling tower may consume more water than any other use. A cooling tower provides cooled water for air-conditioning, manufacturing and electric power generation; its purpose is to reject heat away from the building. The smallest cooling towers are designed to handle water streams of only a few gallons of water per minute supplied in small pipes like those might see in a residence, while the largest cool hundreds of thousands of gallons per minute supplied in pipes as much as 15 feet (about 5 meters) in diameter on a large power plant.
Too much evaporation in a cooling tower means that there is a buildup of scaling and mineral deposits. This in turn can cause the whole system to be less efficient. Some cooling systems actually use potable water and require “blowdown” which means some of the water has to be replaced in order to clean out the tower with more water.
On a larger scale, nineteen power plants along California’s coast use once-through cooling, a process that involves piping in water daily and discharging billions of gallons of hot contaminated water back into the ocean. Evidence has shown that fish and other marine life are slurped up by these pipes at an alarming rate. In the U.S. several non-profit agencies such as Surfrider Foundation and California CoastKeeper Alliance have been trying to pressure the California government to phase out once-through cooling.
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