[Narrator] Funding for this program was made possible by Itron and by The State Energy Conservation Office.

[calming music] [water dripping] [calming music] [calming music] [water dripping] [thunder] [calming music] [calming music] [water dripping] - Water is life.

Water has been key to life and civilization for thousands of years.

We need water within our bodies so our bodies can thrive.

[children laughing] [calming music] We need water to grow food, and then we need water for washing and for hygiene to keep ourselves healthy.

In the modern world, we use water to make energy.

[clock ticking] [calming music] And then we use energy to get access to water.

They're interconnected.

The energy for water is very visible, but the water we use for energy is usually out of sight, out of mind.

Water and energy are the two fundamental components of a modern civilization.

We need water for life and we need energy for quality of life.

We would not know a modern civilization without them.

The bad news is, and if we have a shortage of one, then we might have a shortage of the other, and this becomes very difficult for society.

In some parts of the world, that's a crisis we're already confronting today.

The thing I worry about the most with energy and water is that we take them for granted.

That we need them so much for our quality of life, and I'm afraid because we're not paying attention, we'll make bad decisions and be stuck with those decisions for centuries.

I really want us to get it right.

[soft dramatic music] [calming music] [fireworks exploding] As a kid, I was interested in space and space exploration.

I thought it'd be really cool to go to Mars.

Most of my friends wanted to be astronauts.

I always thought I might be the guy that would run the program.

As someone who was petrified of heights, I didn't think my life as an astronaut would ever really make sense.

[fireworks exploding] I am Michael Webber, and I study energy and water.

I grew up in Austin, Texas, and when I was 12, the family did a trip to the south of France where I got to visit the Pont du Gard, this massive Roman aqueduct.

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪ I was 12 at the time.

My brother, who's 15, was unafraid of heights and sort of a daredevil, walked across the top of it.

And you could fall off of it, it's very dangerous.

He said, "You should walk across the top of it."

I got a fear of heights and I'm kind of clumsy and uncoordinated.

I did it.

But this was a very dizzying experience.

You're hundreds of feet high.

There are places where the roof of the aqueduct was missing.

You had to walk along the very edge.

The whole visit was a gripping memory in a variety of ways.

I was blown away that with ancient means, thousands years ago, such an incredible structure was built and that it was built for the sole purpose of moving water.

[indistinct crowd chatter] [indistinct crowd chatter] [narrator speaking French] [bricks clinking] [bricks clinking] [bricks clinking] [calming music] [Michael] The Romans figured out thousands of years ago, that water and economic power and military power were all the same.

Romans built aqueducts as a way to control the empire, and the water was always moving towards centers of innovation or centers of power.

Water must be important, and that idea hung with me over the years.

[calming music] I've had a deep fascination in energy and water from those early days traveling with my family in Europe.

Now when I'm not traveling, I'm teaching, I'm writing, I'm doing research.

I'm a Professor at the University of Texas.

Eventually, I decided to write a book called "Thirst for Power".

I came to understand that energy and water, they are two most important parts of society.

And I thought it was time for me to share some of those findings with the rest of the world.

History is important for learning any field of study because it gives us context.

A lot of the same challenge we have today, which is try to make a society safe, and prosperous, and free are challenges that we faced before.

And so we have a lot to learn from the historical texts and from the experiences.

Part of the joys of writing a book is to learn about the material that I have to bring together into a story that makes sense for other people.

And then one of the other joys is to teach people what I've learned in writing this book.

And one of my target audiences for that is my own family, whether they like it or not, in particular my kids.

So I'm excited to take my boys to the Pont du Gard.

[upbeat energetic music] This is where we are now.

We're gonna walk towards this.

This is incredible.

So imagine coming up in this 2000 years ago.

- Much bigger than I thought.

- Yeah, it's so much bigger.

- So Pont du Gard bridge was done in the first century AD from 40 to 60.

So five years of construction with the help of 1,000 slaves per day to build the Pont du Gard bridge.

And 15 to 20 for the whole aqueduct of 50 kilometers, 35 miles long from Uzes, from the valley where is the spring of Eure, to Nimes.

- As soon as people came together and started living in groups, they needed a water supply.

So they built a local well.

But when cities got really crowded, they needed a way to provide people with water beyond what was just available from the local stream or the local groundwater well.

The idea being that you could import water from a long distance away, and allow lots of people to live in a very small area.

And I consider the Romans as the first example of this water revolution.

When you want to have a big empire, you have to do wars.

Those who did not win the wars, but who survived became slaves.

The Pont du Gard was built with the help of 1,000 slaves per day.

- The Romans were master engineers and they built water infrastructure.

And as they moved into new territories, they would want to romanized that territory, to make people Romans and to make them part of the empire.

One of the ways they would romanized the territory is to build aqueducts, pipes, fountains, things that would improve the quality of life there so that people would appreciate being Roman.

- Traveling around Europe, you'll see evidence of the Roman aqueducts, even today.

[calming music] [water flowing] [calming music] [calming music] - For the Romans, the water supply was a symbol of wealth, and they celebrated that symbol.

At the height of the Roman Empire, there were close to a million people living the city.

And a simple gravity-fed system of bringing water down through aqueducts provided people with, not only all the water they needed for drinking, but all the water they needed for bathing and cooking, and everything else they wanted to use it for.

In fact, in the Roman cities, people had about the same amount of water, 400 liters per person per day that we currently use in our modern cities.

[dramatic music] [fireworks exploding] - Those that control the water also have political control.

And if the water's not available the way people need it, that can cause political turmoil and the empire might fall.

- I think there's pretty good evidence that civilizations have suffered, and sometimes collapsed and disappeared because of lack of water.

There are strong connections between our hydrology, between droughts and floods and extreme events, and water scarcity and political conflict.

- There are a few different multi-sensory Chinese dynasties that collapsed at a time coincident with drought.

We saw the collapse of the Roman Empire perhaps because of drought.

We saw the Mayan collapse in the 900s.

- Civilizations in the early southwestern United States disappeared because of what we now understand to have been very long duration droughts.

[calming music] [David] In some ways, the Roman Empire was a high point of early civilization.

After the fall of the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, cities were a lot smaller in the western world.

People could get by on the local springs and groundwater supply, and they built much smaller types of water importation systems.

[Michael] People lived where the water was.

People lived near the shoreline, or they lived near creeks and lakes and near natural springs.

That meant Europe and that meant South America.

It meant not the deserts.

- This is an Annecy.

Let's try to cross.

Thank you.

- So the river sets the rhythm and the design and the boundaries of the city.

The city built up around the river and around the lake.

[calming music] - The idea popped up in many places, almost simultaneously it seems, that flowing water could be harnessed and amplified and concentrated to achieve some industrial purpose, or to reduce labor.

Instead of a human grinding grain, the millstone going in a circle could do that for us.

The water would flow over the wheel, it'd spin the wheel, and the wheel would connected by, often, wooden gears and transmission that would rotate a mill or millstone to grind grain.

Or you could use it to crush oil seeds, like grape seed or olives to get oils out.

You could also use it to polish glass.

So there are a variety of things you could use mechanical power for that were very useful, and the water gave us that mechanical power.

[Michael] Over time, empires also use water as a show of power.

[calming music] Kings would use water as a show of strength and opulence.

And this reminds me of Versailles, with the fountains that were so excessive, but really impressive.

Using the water almost like a show of liquid gold.

[calming music] Another show of opulence is to have really well manicured gardens, which means you need to have water to grow them and people to manage them.

So you have slaves or servants and a lot of water available.

And then also you'd have indoor gardens with these orangeries and these greenhouses where you could grow food year round.

You could grow citrus even in the winter because the greenhouses would keep them warm.

Today, fountains are pretty common.

We have drinking fountains in the hallways, and we have sculptures with fountains that spray water because electric pumps are so readily available.

It seems so common.

But if you go back a couple hundred years, fountains were really dramatic because they didn't have electricity, they did not have electric pumps.

You had to use gravity-fed systems with tanks and cisterns and other things that would let the water flow and then come out of the fountains, spraying of the air in a very elaborate fashion.

So to have a fountain with water flowing out of it shooting to the sky was really incredible.

So there are kings or monarchs who were too opulent or too consumptive of their behavior, and eventually their reigns ended.

And we could look at that as an analogy for what could happen in the United States or elsewhere if we waste our energy and water resources, our reign might end also.

[dramatic music] The most important demographic trend over the last few hundred years is movement from rural areas to urban areas.

It's the growth and importance in size of cities.

Cities are now the economic powerhouses.

They're the political powerhouses.

That's where the people and the goods flow.

And when you have a concentration of a lot of people in one place at a city, you have to manage the water, the wastewater, and the energy to run the city.

- It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution and the economies of Western Europe started growing that we needed once again to have an imported water supply.

Because places like Paris and London suddenly had populations approaching the size of Ancient Rome.

In fact, they had an advantage that the Romans didn't have.

They had pipes where they could pressurize the water and move it around the city, and so they could get water into people's homes.

And people started using lots of water.

And with all that water that they were using, they were creating waste.

And that waste had to go somewhere.

- The waste that they were flushing down the drains would go into the river, the same river they used for drinking water.

So they're drinking out of their toilet, so to speak.

But the water flows were lower than normal, so the waste accumulated instead of getting flushed out to sea.

At the same time that it was hot and the air was still, the smell was unbearable.

They named it "The Great Stink" or "The Big Stink".

[David] Suddenly any communicable disease that could be transmitted through water became the problem of the city's downstream neighbor.

And people began to get sick.

And they got sick with diseases like cholera and typhoid fever.

- Finally, London realized its waste was poisoning Londoners.

People were dying, and it was uncomfortable, unpleasant.

So they took action, but they had to build infrastructure through a sewer system to take the waste away.

- John Snow, was in many ways, the first epidemiologist.

John Snow had the idea that cholera was a water-related disease.

And so he mapped cases of cholera in Central London, and he also put on the map, the location of every major water well.

And he noticed that there was a very bad cluster of cholera around one particular well in Central London.

And he went to that well, and he literally unscrewed the pump handle from the well, and he took it away so that the community had to move to other wells to get water.

And the cases of cholera started to disappear.

- But it really wasn't until about the turn of the 20th century that engineers came together and put together a system of water treatment.

And that system of water treatment was driven by the slow sand filter.

It's a very simple idea.

If you pass water through a bed of sand, microbes will start to grow on the surface of the sand grains.

And those microbes secrete a sticky slime layer called a biofilm.

And that biofilm can capture the bacteria and viruses that are in the water that make people sick.

And so by building these slow sand filters, it was possible to take sewage contaminated river water and filter out the waterborne disease-causing organisms and make the water safe to drink.

Paris and London were very different cities with respect to their relationship with water.

London, you get more of a sense that people have turned their back on the river because it was a place of commerce, where ships came and where industry was concentrated.

The French saw the Seine as a place that they wanted to visit.

And so they protected it from pollution the best that they could.

So those classic open sewers that you see pictures of from Paris were there not so much to handle the human waste originally, but to handle the runoff from the streets.

And that's why in the 19th century, it was actually a tourist site to go visit the sewers of Paris.

[classical music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - Something about the Paris sewers is how extensive they are, but they're also big enough to walk through.

So you can walk through the sewers and see the waste flowing by.

You can smell it, you can feel it, right?

It's part of the experience.

And it's an important part of the city's capabilities.

You cannot have a city without a way to manage the wastewater.

I thought it was great.

- This is Eugene Belgrand.

He designed the sewer system.

He calculates that sewer tunnels should have a drop of three centimeters in the meter.

And that is a slope that's steep enough to create the flushing movement in the waters, but it's not so steep that your sewer workers would slip and break their necks.

Here, we can see sewer workers.

Notice we've got one sewer worker above ground, and his colleagues will be working below ground.

You always have somebody above ground.

And what would be the reason for that?

Why do you have somebody above ground?

- Imagine if you've got this thunderstorm, then you might have an inundation, in which case your colleagues might drown.

So that means you've got to keep somebody above ground to keep an eye on the weather.

Can I tempt you into the job of a sewer worker?

No?

[upbeat music] - If you look all the way down on the bottom, you see them when they move.

They just kind of dash across the-- - What do you see?

- The rats.

There, we have another hero of the sewer, Galerie Bruneseau.

And his name, Bruneseau, it's like destiny, because if you break down the word, you get bru.

What's bru?

Brown.

And seau is a bucket.

Mr. Brown Bucket.

So that's perfect, isn't it?

- It was smelly.

- I thought, aside from that, I thought it was really cool to see the way they organized all the waste.

I thought it was cool how they used those big balls to crush and the pulverize the mountains.

- These siphons cannot be maintained by human beings.

Too dangerous.

So, the solution is balls.

You've basically got a ball that will fit snugly into the siphon tube.

When the ball is in place, the water will build up behind and set the ball rolling through the siphon.

- Um.

- No.

- No.

But it was, it was interesting.

- The farmers here started to pump raw human sewage into their vegetable roots.

And what vegetables did they grow there do you think?

- Tomatoes.

- Pooh-tatoes.

[tour group laughing] Turd-nips.

[tour group laughing] In a way, it's almost like the flip side of life above ground, where everybody is sort of like mannered, going about their daily business, sort of adopting heirs and graces.

And down in the sewers, you kind of like confront the raw human condition, if you like.

We have no secrets from sewer workers.

They know exactly what you're doing above ground.

[toilet flushing] [Michael] The Paris sewers teach us that managing waste is important, that we generate waste from our trash, from our bodies, from civilization as a whole.

And you have to manage the waste.

You have to dispose of it or deal with it in some way.

And we use energy along the way to manage those wastes so that we don't choke on our own pollution.

♪ There's a great and peaceful river ♪ ♪ In a land that's fair to see ♪ ♪ Where the Douglas fir tree ♪ ♪ Whispers to the snowcap mountain breeze ♪ ♪ Roll Columbia, won't you roll, roll, roll ♪ ♪ Roll Columbia, won't you roll, roll, roll ♪ [Michael] All the way up until the Industrial Revolution, water was always used for mechanical power.

But around the time of the Industrial Revolution, we start to see a connection between modern forms of energy and water.

If you have flowing water, you could spin a turbine, which can spin magnets, which can give you electricity.

Devices were made that could generate electricity and use that electricity.

And as a consequence, the demand for electricity was growing.

- There are very strong connections between energy and water.

The one people think about the most is the water that we use to produce the energy that we need.

The hydroelectric dams that we build like Hoover, or like the grand dams on the Columbia River.

[Film Narrator] On the Columbia River, a vast new industry is rising.

A symbol of the place of power in a new age, taking minerals from the earth and power from the water.

- In the 1930s, the United States started a large build out of hydroelectric power.

There were a couple reasons for this.

One is the Great Depression was afoot, a lot of unemployment, and there was a need for jobs and infrastructure investment as a way to get the economy going again.

At the same time, there were all these killer floods that were wiping out farms and killing a lot of people.

So there's a desire to build dams that would give us reservoirs of water that we could use in times of drought to irrigate our crops, that would control the floods, that make it easier to navigate the waterways, to use barges to move goods around, to enable electrical power, and as a way to stimulate the economy through jobs creation.

And so that's what we did.

- The rural electrification acts in the '30s and the '40s brought power, hydroelectric power primarily to the south and to the Pacific Northwest.

[Narrator] To the women of Cascade Locks, their Columbia River took on new meaning.

It became part of their daily lives.

- At home, women started to have electric appliances that popped up, appliances that could do some of the manual labor for them.

And that changed our relationship between men and women in the workforce, because some of the chores that women would do by hand can now be done by electric appliances.

And you start to see the birth of the women's rights movement, and the desire to move into the workplace happened at the same time that appliances were coming into the homes.

[propeller whirling] - In World War II, those big hydroelectric dams powered the aluminum industry in the United States that provided critical material for the US war effort.

[Film Narrator] Making the wings for America, the aluminum for one out of every three of our fighting planes.

Building the fortresses to keep the war from our shores.

- So the energy water connection from hydroelectricity alone is a critical part of American history.

[upbeat music] [Michael] In Texas, where we don't have a lot of water, we also build dams.

And a part of that was the rural electrification effort, the effort to bring electricity to rural areas.

- This used to be the world's largest dam, right?

- At one time it was, yeah.

- Is the world's largest dam.

It wasn't this one, 'cause that one fell.

So that dam down there wasn't world largest dam.

When was it destroyed the first time?

- 1895, I believe, was the first time it was destroyed.

There was a massive flood at that time.

And this being the only dam on the Colorado, it took the full brunt of everything that came down the river.

[Michael] Now this third one, is this one gonna fall or is this-- - No, this one's had many improvements to it.

We did a lot, a big anchoring project.

- Structural reinforcement.

- Structural reinforcement.

- Plus, there are other dams on the river now, right, too?

- Yes.

- With each dam it helps stop the flood, right?

So if you have a wave of water, it slows it down.

Less likely to knock one dam down.

- Yeah, right.

- The building of dams for politicians was something that they could celebrate.

They could say, look, we brought the dam, we're helping reduce the incidents of floods or the damage of floods.

We're bringing you electrical power, we're managing nature, we're taming nature, we're taming the waterways.

So politicians love to build the dams, and they were celebrated for it.

It was a way for them to maintain power and serve their people.

There's a proverb in the American West, which is, "Whiskey's for drinking and water's for fighting over," because who gets access to the water has access to wealth and power.

[dramatic music] - As part of our development of a modern, sophisticated set of chemical and biological and engineering systems to provide safe water, we forgot a few things or we ignored a few things, or we didn't know about a few things, in particular about the impact of our modern industrial society on the quality of our water systems and on impacts on natural ecosystems.

[Film Narrator] Being near water, these communities dump their waste matter, their sewage into the streams for easy disposal.

- We continued to release untreated sewage into rivers.

And over time, as our cities grew and people lived in closer proximity to one another, that started to cause problems.

In the period after the Second World War, you can see more and more complaints.

The Potomac is impossible to walk next to.

The Great Lakes are dying from fish kills and the algae.

All of the great rivers of the United States and Western Europe are suddenly getting polluted.

The issue that galvanized the public's attention was the fire on the Cuyahoga River outside of Cleveland.

[solemn music] [Peter] The Cuyahoga River in Ohio, dumping into Lake Erie caught fire.

And it caught fire not because the water was burning, but because the industrial wastes that we were dumping there were burning.

- And it wasn't the first time the Cuyahoga River caught on fire.

It caught on fire many times before that.

What had changed is that in the late 1960s, the world was undergoing a series of social revolutions.

- There were a couple things that happened in the '60s that enabled cultural shifts.

One was we went to space.

And when you go to space and you look down to Earth, you see the earth is blue.

One of the Apollo astronauts took this photo, the most popular photo in the history of humanity, because it was the first time you see all of Earth in one frame.

Going to the moon or looking at Earth gave us something that we appreciated as precious, they wanted to protect.

So people tie the birth of the environmental movement with the space program.

- And that led to the Clean Water Act, which finally put limits on industrial contamination of water, and the Safe Drinking Water Act, which sets standards for the quality of water that utilities could deliver to our homes and to our industries.

- And so in a 20-year period, starting in the early 1970s, we turned our rivers and lakes and estuaries from places that no one wanted to go, to places where now was safe to visit, and to fish, and to swim.

- And that also means as you're building cities and expanding cities, you have to invest in the water treatment capability and the wastewater treatment capabilities so you can keep the water clean.

[upbeat music] - My name is Raj Bhattarai.

I'm the Manager of the Environmental and Regulatory Services division for Austin Water.

Most people don't realize the amount of energy needed to bring water to homes, especially clean water.

People take it for granted and they turn the tap on, the water is always there.

They don't realize how much work has gone behind that, and how much energy is embedded in that water.

This is the raw water pump station where we pump the water from the lake up above us to the water treatment plant.

What you see here on the top are the large motors, 1500 horsepower motors, and below that are the vertical turbine pumps.

We have five of these pumps, and the motor turns very fast, and that turns the turbines in the pump, and the turbines rotate.

They push the water uphill from the lake, all the way to the treatment plant, several hundred feet above us.

And this is where the major energy consumption happens.

Water is heavy.

To lift water, to push water up, elevate the water from lower level to high level, requires a lot of energy just because of its weight.

This is what we call a onsite hypochlorite generation facility.

Here, instead of using chlorine, which can be dangerous with leaks, we bring salt and mix it with water.

And through the use of electricity, through electrolosys we create bleach or hypochlorite.

So we use some electricity here, creating bleach, which is then used for disinfection.

[upbeat music] This is really the heart of the treatment for this drinking water plant.

This is where all the chemicals are mixed together, and a lot of the pollutants are removed to make the drinking water really clean.

So these are the two, three-horsepower pumps.

And then this one is the 50-horsepower turbine pump.

That's basically to mix the chemicals.

We add lime, and iron salt, carbon, a lot of chemicals to make the water clean.

So the water here looks really good, almost looks like it's good to drink, but not yet.

[upbeat music] This is a what we call the filter gallery.

The filtered water comes through here and we measure how clean the water is.

This is the same water that came from the lake pumped up here, but lot cleaner.

That is 10 times cleaner than the standard we are required to maintain.

[upbeat music] - Wonderful.

Drinking water pipelines are always pressurized because we don't want any contaminant from outside coming in.

So that's where most of the energy is used, and for the drinking water.

For wastewater, most of the pipeline that collects and brings the wastewater from the homes to the treatment plant is gravity line.

So, they're sloping towards the treatment plant.

Those treatment plants are low lying areas because we want to take advantage of gravity.

It's reliable and it's free.

Once it gets to the treatment plant, because it comes at a low level, it may have to be pumped up again.

So a substantial amount of energy is used for pumping the waste water or bringing the waste water up back above the ground level.

But the largest energy use in the waste water plant is not in pumping, but in providing oxygen to the bacteria that provide the treatment.

So what's waste for us is food for the bacteria.

And for that, they require a lot of oxygen.

Fifty to 60% of the energy is used in running the blowers.

We are looking at what we call the outfall from one of our wastewater treatment plants.

We do a really good job of treating wastewater that we saw earlier, and that exceptionally treated wastewater, it is so good that it's helping maintain the exceptional quality for this segment of the Colorado River.

So that means Austin is number one in number two.

We could say that.

This is the only place in Texas, and probably only of a handful in the nation, where the water quality designation of a river or a stream downstream of a major urban area actually improves.

- We are just as dependent on water for life today as we ever were.

But we don't understand the dependence as clearly because we don't have to go hustle for the water the way people did thousands of years ago.

The water comes to us at the flick of a switch, or the movement of a lever at our sink.

It's so easy the way water comes to us, we forget how important it is.

But it's just as important.

- Water is really critical to most of the energy system that we rely on in the United States and across the world.

- We consume about 10% of our fresh water withdrawals for the energy system.

Actually, when you start to look at salty water, we also consume about 10% of those withdrawals as well for energy systems.

- We use a tremendous amount of energy to clean, treat, deliver the water that we need.

But it turns out that we also use a tremendous amount of water just to cool the major thermal electric power plants of America, the nuclear plants, the coal, oil, and natural gas plants.

And so those connections between water and energy are what we talk about when we talk about the water energy nexus.

- So we use water to get the energy resource out of the ground.

Think of oil, there are techniques like water flooding where you inject water into the oil well to flush the oil out.

There are techniques like hydraulic fracturing, where you use water to fracture the shale to get oil and gas out of the ground.

You use water at coal mines to rinse the coal and to do dust control.

Water's used at uranium mines to mine the uranium.

You'll use water to leach out the different minerals materials, and the water is sometimes used in industrial processes to say, enrich or upgrade the uranium or the coal or to treat the natural gas.

So water is also used to make the fuels at the power plant.

Then it's used to make this steam at the power plant.

Then water is used to cool the power plant.

Sometimes water is used to move the natural gas or coal or uranium by barges or ships.

So water is used all up and down the supply chain of the power sector.

In fact, the power sector uses more water for cooling than the agricultural sector uses for growing food, for example.

So it's a big number.

[upbeat music] - We are at one of our power plants.

In many power plants, they use water and they heat it to turn into steam, and the steam pressure turns a turbine, that turns the generator, and that generates electricity.

So that's how we get most of the energy.

Cooling the generators requires a lot of water, hence we have this cooling tower here that uses the water to make the power plant work more efficiently.

We are doing our part here by supplying our highly treated wastewater, what we call reclaimed water.

And this particular plant uses about 50 million gallons of reclaimed water per month.

By switching to reclaimed water, we save the drinking water for drinking purposes, and then we use the reclaimed water for the cooling.

The flow right now is about 2,200 gallons a minute, because of the summer demand, it is very hot.

It's over 100 degrees.

[upbeat music] - Because the power sector uses so much water, when we're plugging in electrical device, we're actually consuming water, whether we know it or not.

That water is being used out of sight out of mind, maybe at a power plant hundreds of miles away.

But we're plugging into water.

We think we're plugging into electricity, we are, but we're plugging into water too.

It turns out that a typical American uses something like 150 gallons of water per person per day in their home for watering the lawn, showering, cooking, the tap, the shower head, that kind of thing.

But we're using hundreds of gallons of water per person per day to cool the power plants to make the electricity for that same home.

We're using more water through our electrical outlets in our lights than we are through our water system whether we realize it or not.

- One of the challenges with trying to get at this number of how much water is embedded in our energy system, for example, is actually a pretty hard number to get to, because we don't quantify how much water is consumed in the United States.

- We don't track our water consumption in the United States and I think that's fairly true across other countries as well.

And so we have a very limited sense of what's actually happening to that system in many cases.

- If you're lucky enough to have a city that has a municipal water provider and a municipal power provider, that's gonna be your best opportunity to really understand that relationship.

That's often not the case.

[Kelly] When we think about the energy system and we think about the water system, we usually think about them in independent silos.

So they're often managed in independent silos.

And the challenge with that is we can build a power plant without thinking about, will the water be there for cooling over the long term?

Or we can build a desalination plant and not think about what are the environmental implications of generating all of this electricity that's going to be needed for this plant.

What's happening over time, especially in this context of climate change, where it's getting hotter and it's getting drier in some areas, and wetter in other areas, there's constraining tensions that are happening across this nexus.

[Michael] I feel like all up and down the energy supply chain, water is at every critical step.

That means if the water's not available the way you want it to be, the energy system is vulnerable.

- Once it became practical to move water long distances and get it to cities, suddenly we were no longer constrained in locating our cities in places with an abundant water source.

- There was a real romance to engineering.

You know, they talk about bringing flowers to the desert, making the desert bloom.

And I think that the culture at the time, and maybe now to some extent, was that we could engineer nature, that we could make something unnatural natural.

[David] And so you could build a city in a part of the desert where there wasn't an obvious water supply if you could bring in a canal and get the water there.

- We're sitting in the middle of Los Angeles, 90% of all of the water that enters the city actually originated hundreds of miles away.

And we pumped that water over hundreds of miles and over mountain ranges to get here.

And that process is very energy intensive.

[David] Much of California's reservoir and canal system relies upon surface water storage.

And that means that the precipitation comes in the winter time, and much of the use occurs during the spring and summer and subsequent fall.

If you have a dry year, you probably have enough water in the reservoirs to get through the next year.

But if you have five years of drought or 10 years of drought, suddenly you may not have enough water in those reservoirs, and you run the risk of running out of water.

One of the most important risks to this water system is a place called the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, or The Delta.

It's an area where the soils consisted of organic muck.

And that muck material over time, disappeared through microbes breaking it down.

And the land started to sink.

And as that land started to sink, the farmers put up levees and dikes to protect their farms until we've reached a point now where the farmers are farming well below the level of the river.

And if something were to happen to the levees protecting those delta islands, a surge of water would come into the delta from the San Francisco Bay, bringing salty ocean water into the intake pipes that take water to Southern California.

And if that kind of event happened, Southern California's cities and farms could lose their water supply for several years.

- California is an earthquake-prone region, and one of the challenges of a big, big earthquake is what it's going to do to our water system.

[earthquake rumbling] A really big earthquake is gonna disrupt every part of modern civilization.

It's gonna destroy water systems, it's gonna destroy energy delivery systems, it's gonna destroy wastewater plants.

All bets are off in a really, really big earthquake.

Hopefully the big earthquake that comes, and it's coming, will be disruptive for a relatively short period of time.

- The main problem that we have when we think about the relationship between energy to water nexus is that we're simply not planning them together.

That can mean having to shut down a lot of power plants in a very peak period because there simply is not the water to run them.

There is no backup plan.

If the water isn't there or it's the wrong temperature, you're done.

- That has been an issue here in the United States in isolated pockets.

But it's also been a huge problem around the world where water has actually become a constraint on electricity production, and more broadly, energy production.

- One incident was the drought in India, 2012, that led to the biggest blackout in the history of the world.

Because there was drought, the dams were generating less power than normal.

There was less water, so they got less power out of the dams.

So the supply of electricity was lower than normal.

Because of the drought, farmers are irrigating their farms more than normal 'cause they didn't have rainfall, and they used electric pumps to move the water around, so demand was higher than normal.

Demand and supply got out of balance, and you add in decades of lack of proper investment in maintaining the grid, and the whole thing came crumbling down.

India went dark for two weeks, 620 million people without electricity for several weeks.

So real threat to life and health for a lot of people.

A big hit to the economy because of a water constraint to becoming an electricity constraint.

- Here in the United States, every year, water actually becomes so warm that you can't adequately cool large power plants like nuclear facilities.

And in those cases, we actually have to curtail the production of that electricity, because those water resources are either low or it actually gets so warm that you can't cool the power plant safely.

- The choke points that we've seen in the United States, I'm not sure have gotten quite to the catastrophic level.

They've sort of danced on that line.

The example that I think of is, in 2011, in Texas, when you know, the drought map literally showed us this shade of red that, you know, looked like we were dying on the table.

Actually it was right around 2011, that drought, I was living in Lubbock, and it did not rain one time in 365 days, not once, not one drop of water.

Had that drought gone on one more year, there would've been many other horrible consequences, but I definitely think we would've really seen an impact in the power structure.

So I think it's only by luck that we've gotten this far.

It's not an indication that there isn't a problem.

And I've thought a lot about this, you know, why is it that something that we all agree would be extremely catastrophic?

Why are we not banding together on this?

And I think part of it might be the overwhelming sort of, it's almost impossible to imagine, right?

A city out of water.

The question is, how likely is it that a drought is gonna go on to that length of time?

In Texas, I would say it's 100% likely.

It's just a matter of when.

It's hot here, you know?

It's not just about your shower, it's about just, you know, living in a comfortable way.

[Peter] There is natural climate change.

We know that wet areas have sometimes been drier, and dry areas have sometimes been wetter over very long periods of time.

We also know that human civilization is influencing desertification and overusing local water resources.

Climate change is happening on a much faster timescale than some of these ancient long-term changes in climate that we've seen.

In the 21st century, if we're gonna manage our resources in a sustainable fashion, we have to manage those resources together.

We have to think about water and energy and ecosystems, and all of the other things we care about as a whole rather than as separate isolated resources.

The truth is we waste a huge amount of the water that we already spend a lot of energy and money collecting and treating and distributing, and we use it inefficiently.

We could grow much more food with a lot less water.

We could meet our demands for water and industry more efficiently.

A sustainable future for water means smart infrastructure.

It means new thinking about supply.

First of all, we have to move away from the sole approach of engineering, infrastructure, of building big dams and aqueducts, of building big centralized water treatment plants.

[Amy] Number one, people need to understand the relationship.

That way, if they want to make changes in their lives, they understand the consequences of that.

Best way to save power, turn your water off.

You know, best way to save water, turn your electricity off.

It's a positive feedback loop.

So it's not sort of, it ends up not being, I saved X number of gallons, it's I ended up saving X number of gallons, which then saved X number of kilowatts, which then saved X number of gallons somewhere else.

One of the critical things for places that have climatic challenges is to be honest about where you are.

From a behavior and planning standpoint, know your environment.

[David] Increasingly, the ways in which we're obtaining energy, wind, and solar and other kinds of renewable forms of energy don't have the same demands for vast amounts of water for cooling.

So one of the benefits of wind power and solar power relative to fossil fuel production is lower demand for water.

Over time, we've learned ways to use water more efficiently, but we're gonna be forced to go further.

[Peter] It's ironic that given all the water challenges here, we live on a water planet.

Arthur C. Clark, a great science fiction writer once said that if we didn't happen to live on the land portion of the planet, if we weren't air- breathing mammals, we'd actually call this Ocean, not Earth.

And when we go into space and we look for life, and we look on other planets, we spend a lot of time looking for water.

- Getting water into space is very difficult 'cause water's heavy, and it's expensive to lift things into space.

So once you're in orbit, it's probably better to look for water out there than it is to bring it up from the Earth.

- Every time they resupply the Space Station, the biggest thing they carry up there is water.

Because water is so heavy, and yet it's so critical for what we do.

[Michael] And that's why looking for water in the crust of the moon, or on asteroids, or in Mars is really interesting.

And there probably is water in the moon from comets or ice balls that hit the moon, that have buried the water below the surface.

[Peter] A lot of great science fiction is built around finding and capturing and using water resources, finding ice in asteroids and using it to green Mars.

That is gonna have to be part of our future.

We're going to go where the water is, because water is the critical resource.

We know that without water, there is no life as we know it.

- After many years of dreaming about it, I finally got a job at NASA.

For my final project for my PhD, I got to work on the bioreactor that's used on the Space Station to generate fresh drinking water for the astronauts.

To take water from washing hands, or perspiration, or urination onboard the Space Shuttle, and turn that wastewater, that gray water into drinking water that the astronauts could drink onboard.

Going to space is great, but we still have problems here and now we have to solve on Earth.

And what space gives us as an eye from the sky that gives us better view of what's happening on the ground than we can't even see from five feet away.

But we can't run away from our problems forever.

At some point, we have to solve the here and now.

When she was younger, my daughter, Evelyn, and I used to brush our teeth together every night.

Just a father-daughter ritual.

Turn the water on to get the toothbrush wet, turn the water off to brush our teeth for about a minute, then turn the water on to rinse the toothbrush again.

And we turned the water off while brushing, and that would save a gallon or two of water.

One evening, I didn't turn the water off fast enough to her liking, so she turned the water off and made a fist, and kind of scowled me and said, "Turn off the water, Daddy.

"The scientists need time."

Which really cracked me up as I looked at this precocious child who's got this view of the future.

And I thought she really nailed it.

Conservation is the most important and first tool we have in our toolkit, and it buys a lot of time while we develop the other solutions.

And boy, do we need them.

[calming music] We've learned the importance of energy and water to our civilization, but I don't think we've learned the importance of manage them wisely so that we have the resources available going into the future at the right abundance so that we can have a prosperous free life.

There's some lessons we've learned in the past, but some that we still need to learn again.

[calming music] ♪ ♪ When I saw my kids playing in the water by the Pont du Gard, that made me feel great.

I'm so glad that they had that freedom and that opportunity.

And I want their great grandkids to have water to play in as well.

[dramatic music] The problems are big and sometimes they seem overwhelming.

People often wonder, well, what can I do, or what should I do to help?

It starts with us making decisions around turning off devices when we leave a room and not wasting energy and water in our homes.

As a family, thinking about where we live and how we run our household, and what kind of cars or appliances we own and operate.

As a city, it means city planning for transportation lanes that leave room for bikes, or walking, or mass transit, that kind of thing.

At the state level, it means cooperation with other states around water resources and thinking about our energy infrastructure.

At the national, international level, it means agreements around pollution.

So at every level, we've got decisions to make, and we need to get them all right.

We need to manage energy and water wisely to give our kids a chance, and to give our kids' kids a chance so that they aren't confined to an environmental prison sentence.

I would like to see a more sustainable system where we don't deplete our precious resources, where we don't waste our resources, and where more people have access to the resources they need.

To take the long view, we need to change our attitudes today.

[climactic music] [dramatic music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] Funding for this program was made possible by Itron and by The State Energy Conservation Office.