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As interstate disputes over the Colorado River and other water fights loom large in future years, power-supply problems promise to be twice the headache.

People are moving into arid Arizona and Nevada quickly enough to make them the fastest-growing states in the nation. The demand for power across the Southwest is expected to roughly double by 2025.

And that power is coming, by and large, from electricity producers across the West that rely on water.

That's 650 million gallons of water per day for power generation, said Gary Deason of Northern Arizona University's Center for Sustainable Environments. NAU, in Flagstaff, hosted a recent summit on sustainability, where the people charged with providing water and power across the nation looked toward the future, trying to solve problems they'll share.

Among them was Mike Hightower of Sandia National Laboratories, a group that studies threats to the nation's water and power supplies for Congress.

While 70 percent of the water in the West goes to irrigation for farming, electricity generation is also still largely water-related, Hightower said.

Add climate change, drought, population booms in arid areas, microclimates that keep cities such as Phoenix hot and more energy spent pumping water from deeper in aquifers, and you have a "potential train wreck," Hightower said.

Speakers at the conference focused on big-picture solutions.

Biofuels can't save the day en masse, Hightower said, because of the amount of water needed to irrigate the vast cropland that would be required.

Hydroelectric power can be a problem during drought. Hydrogen power requires substantial water availability.

And desalination of seawater requires a lot of power.

"The issues of water availability are not just a Western issue," Hightower said. "They-'re becoming a national issue."

The solutions, in his view, might involve placing power generation next to water-treatment facilities and giving special tax credits or other incentives to water-efficient renewable forms of energy that don't use water, such as wind power.