The video explains that it makes use of “excess” water pressure that is normally controlled by valves downstream from the main in order to limit pressure at the tap. Presumably this doesn’t reduce the pressure below nominal tap pressure.
Everyone focuses on peak oil, but there is also going to be peak efficiency: When we run out of ways to use our resources more efficiently. The amount of cleaning my low flow toilet requires makes me feel like it’s getting close.
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I think you’re right, we will reach peak efficiency. But I think people will just keep trying. We keep deluding ourselves into believing that we can figure out a way to have everything we want.
I think what we need to reach is peak human greed, and then retreat from that, but I don’t know if it will ever happen.
I don’t mean greed on the part of the rich or the capitalist owners, etc… I mean every one of us—everyone wants more, no matter how much they have. Using resources more efficiently is just a way to try to satisfy our desires to have stuff and more stuff and better stuff, without facing the fact that it’s the desire to have things that’s the problem, not the nature of the things themselves or the efficiency of making/procuring/disposing of them. We can’t outrun our own greed. We need to manage our greed and transform it into something else. If that could ever happen, I don’t think it will happen soon enough to save us.
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Much of what you describe applies to the Los Angeles Aqueduct and the LADWP distribution system.
The aqueduct, built 1905-1911, not only supplied the water to accommodate LA’s explosive early 20th-C. growth, it was also, for some years, the primary source of electrical power for the city.
The Aqueduct is entirely gravity-fed. LADWP’s local distribution system is also (almost) entirely gravity-driven, and it also contains hydropower generators - the Franklin and Sawtelle plants shown above, and several others added since. The huge new Headworks storage tanks that will replace Silver Lake’s open reservoir include a 4 MW hydro plant to extract energy from the tanks’ incoming flow.
In fact, the LA Aqueduct was generating power even before it delivered water - the Division Creek and Cottonwood power plants are sited where large tributaries enter the Owens River, and their power was used for the electric dredges that dug most of the canal, and to supply power to the work camps building the Aqueduct.
LA has added other water and power sources in the years since, but the Aqueduct remains a substantial net power producer.
(LADWP also piggybacks a large generating station on the CA State Water Project at Castaic, which not only recovers a portion of the energy used to pump SWP’s water over the Tehachapis, but also doubles as a large pumped-storage system – the generators can reverse to be used as pumps, pumping water back uphill from Castaic to Pyramid Reservoir when excess power is available, and then turning that stored water to back to electricity when demand is high. Very useful for intermittent renewable sources like solar and wind.)
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