question: About how many cubic meters of make-up water is used by a 700-megawatt coal-fired power plant for evaporative cooling hourly?
sentence: Evaporative cooling towers need less water flow than "once-through" cooling by river or lake water; a 700 megawatt coal-fired power plant may use about 3600 cubic metres of make-up water every hour for evaporative cooling, but would need about twenty times as much if cooled by river water.[citation needed]