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The automotive leader has a strong track record of water use reductions in its manufacturing operations and an aggressive goal to reduce water use even further – by 30 percent per vehicle by 2015. But many at Ford and a number of its stakeholders (including the company’s Ceres stakeholder advisory team) see growing water competition and scarcity as a potential economic game-changer – with big implications for the auto industry.

But water is critical to a number of manufacturing steps, including vehicle painting, where large volumes of water are traditionally used to rinse cars, ensuring that not a speck of dust ruins that perfect paint job. Water use also can be high in the automotive supply chain, particularly in making raw materials such as steel and aluminum. Ford also has identified that the energy sources used to power its vehicles (gasoline, electric power or biofuels) play an incredibly important role in determining the water footprint of its vehicles, because of the large amounts of water required for fuel production and power generation.

SCE customers lease or own more than 12,000 plug-in electric vehicles (PEV), which represent about 10 percent of national EV sales. Because California leads the nation in EV adoption, other utilities and stakeholders in the auto industry may find the information from the white paper useful.

The Southern California region and SCE’s service territory in particular is seeing significant uptick of early plug-in vehicle adoption,”