Below the fold is the 3/10 testimony to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources United States Senate by Professor Michael Webber, Department of Mechanical Engineering and Associate Director, Center for International Energy & Environmental Policy at The University of Texas at Austin (hat-tip Debbie Cook).

Dr. Webber explains the intricate and increasingly vital links between energy and water, both in the United States, and the world. As previously mentioned, I have a paper (finally after nearly 3 years) in press on the Energy Return on Water Invested - a statistic that further adjusts a technologies unit energy return for each associated water unit (consumption or withdrawal). How we choose/optimize between limited and limiting natural resources will be the central policy challenge in the decades ahead. I am encouraged that government is hearing about not only about scarcity of low cost vital inputs, but their inter-relationships.

Here's a slideshow of some of the key images. I'll have more on this as information becomes available. Kudos to WNYC and ProPublica for uncovering this in a great example of investigative journalism.

There were a couple of small Australian solar power projects that I left out of my look at solar thermal power a little while ago, as I thought they were worthy of separate consideration.

I talked about one of these - Wizard Power's technique for storing energy using ammonia - last week. The other project is by a company called Acquasol which is building a plant to desalinate water using solar thermal energy at Point Paterson, near Port Augusta in South Australia.

Like Wizard Power and Lloyd Energy's graphite based energy storage technique, Acquasol received an initial round of funding from the (now defunct) Australian Greenhouse Office's Advanced Energy Storage Technology program.

In this post I'll look at the Acquasol project and then more generally at water scarcity worldwide and some of the approaches being taken to tackle it.