If water consumption is the ...
Published by James Stewart
If water consumption is the primary concern here, you can select an alternate water supply, but this does nothing if not increase the water consumption, due to the conditions relative to treated effluent.
If you really want to conserve water, stop using evaporation altogether as a means of cooling.
This has severe penalties of course, when you consider the extra space required for air coolers, depending on the heat load you are dissipating. Not only that, air cooling can never cool the water being cooled (or other process fluid) below ambient dry bulb temperature, and in fact cannot reach dry bulb temperature owing to the limits of approach temperatures.
If your process can suffer the penalty (in a power generation plant where steam turbine exhaust is being condensed, the penalty is about 15-20% of maximum power output), which as explained can be quite severe, and if you have sufficient space in which to place a large air cooler, then you will be successful in saving upward of 90% of water previously consumed. This can represent a seriously worthwhile cost savings in certain cases.
An option to consider along with dry cooling (closed heat exchange with outside air), is the use of cool air storage at night, or even heat pump produced cold air stored in high thermal mass.