Arizona’s cost of moving water could be about to go up

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The coal-Central Arizona Project link always seemed a bit of a Rube Goldberg policy apparatus to me. Its Goldbergness seems about to unravel.

Felicia Fonseca at the AP reports today on the potential costs of a retrofit to the Navajo Generating Station, up the hill from Glen Canyon Dam. The plant is part of a Byzantine deal to get water through the Central Arizona Project, which pumps Colorado River Water uphill to Phoenix and Tucson. The original plan was to build a series of power dams in the Grand Canyon to provide the electricity to move the water. That idea created one of western water’s great WTF moments, and the Grand Canyon dams were scrapped back in the ’60s. Instead, the government built a coal plant to generate the cheap electricity to move the water. Cheap, dirty electricity:

Requiring a coal-fired power plant on the Navajo Nation to further regulate pollution would not, by itself, force the plant’s retirement, but it could significantly increase water rates for agricultural users and American Indian tribes, a study released Wednesday found.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: first steps for Navajo-Gallup pipeline

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From the morning paper, the US Bureau of Reclamation has taken a big step toward construction of the Navajo-Gallup Pipeline, which is a big deal around these parts:

Jason John, head of the [Navajo] nation’s Water Management Branch, called the request for bids on the pipeline “a huge milestone” in bringing water supplies to the traditionally underserved communities in western New Mexico, where residents have to haul water to their homes in tanks in the beds of their pickup trucks.

“We’re starting in that area because there’s an immediate need for water in that area,” said U.S. Bureau of Reclamation project manager Pat Page.

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Elephant Butte

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Elephant Butte Dam was one of the first big concrete dam’s in America. It currently doesn’t have much water behind it. My column:

An enthusiastic crowd wandered the top of Elephant Butte Dam on Jan. 7, celebrating, with good reason, the structure’s role in New Mexico history. But it must have been hard to ignore the distance down to the water on the dam’s upstream face.

When they are brimful, with their outlets roaring, big dams like Elephant Butte are triumphal. But the big empty behind the dam, like we see this January in what looks like is shaping up to be a second consecutive year of drought on the Rio Grande, taunts our frailty.

The Jevons Paradox and greywater reuse

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Hey lazyweb – anybody know if someone’s looked rigorously at the question of greywater use in the context of a Jevons-like paradox?

Putting together some notes for a talk this weekend to the Xeriscape Garden Club of Albuquerque (Sat. 10 a.m. at the Garden Center if you’re in town), I’ve been thinking anew about the question of greywater use – running a second plumbing system from the sinks and other non-poopy waste producers in your house out to the garden.

It seems obvious that this is a winner, because you’re making use of the wastewater rather than just throwing it away. Except that in many settings, it’s not thrown away, but rather returned via the sewage treatment plant for use by others. Here’s the new National Research Council report on reuse:

[E]xtensive reuse has the potential to affect the water supply of downstream users and ecosystems in water-limited settings.

The NRC is talking about larger-scale reuse, but the principle is the same. If you’re on the coast, and your sewage outfall goes directly into the ocean, greywater reuse seems like a no-brainer. But in desert communities like Albuquerque, it’s a more complicated question. My sewage goes back into the Rio Grande, where it is used by others. A gallon I divert from my wastewater stream to water my garden is one less gallon we remove from the Rio Grande at the north end of town, and one less gallon we return at the south end of town. There may still be good reasons for doing this – energy, system losses, treatment costs, etc. But “saving” that gallon of water is not one of them.

So here’s the Jevons question. For those not familiar, in brief, the Jevons paradox is the notion that, as energy technology gets more efficient, rather than simply dropping our energy consumption, we at least in part do more of whatever it was we were doing with the energy. So as lighting got more efficient and therefore less expensive, one of the things we did was light up a lot more of our spaces.

What if, by using greywater, I figure that since I’m using water that’s kinda “free” in the context of both money and supply, I figure I can use more in the garden?

River Beat: a forecast for decline on the Colorado again this year

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It’s all fun and games until you actually have to measure snow.

The US Bureau of Reclamation’s first 2012 Colorado Basin reservoir forecast (the “24-month study”, pdf) projects a decline in total storage in lakes Mead and Powell, the Colorado River’s largest storage reservoirs, of 844,000 acre feet, or 2.76 percent.

Dec. and Jan. 2012 Colorado storage forecast

Dec. and Jan. 2012 Colorado storage forecast

There are two ways of framing this.

Let me start with the pessimistic, illustrated by this graph comparing the December and January projections. The December projection is based on no real forecast at all, but rather what amounts to an assumption of normal snow. There’s nothing wrong with this. That early in the season, the water managers have no idea what to expect, and they’re not making decisions based on the forecasters, so you could think of it as a placeholder. The January forecast is based on the first real numbers, which show a paltry snowpack in the upper basin – 66 percent (by one measure, the Colorado Basin Forecast Center’s aggregation of snow measurement sites upstream of Lake Powell) as of the date the forecast was made. The blue line is the December forecast, the red line is January once actual snowpack for the years is factored in. It’s down 2.2 million acre feet. But since that time, there hasn’t been much snow. The CBRFC Powell group today (Sat. 1/14/12) is down to 58 percent of average. Don’t put too much stock on the specific percentages (Danger! Amateur using Snotel!), but rather look at the trend. It’s down. With the forecast favoring dry through the end of the month, it’s reasonable to expect the projections to drop.

That’s the pessimistic frame.

Here’s the optimistic frame.

While an 844,000 acre foot drop is a lot of water, last year the total storage in the two reservoirs rose by 5.2 million acre feet. It would take six consecutive years of drops of the size currently projected for 2012 to wipe out the gains from last year’s bounty. From 2000-2010, during the Drought of the ’00s, the reservoirs averaged a 2 million acre foot per year drop. 844kaf is not a big number in that context.

Here’s my total storage graph, updated with the end-of-water year 2012 estimate from the latest 24-month study:

Total historic storage in Lakes Mead and Powell

Total historic storage in Lakes Mead and Powell (2012 projected)

What do you think? Which frame is “right”?

Amid uncertainty, IID bumps up fallowing $’s

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While archaeological metaphor can be instructive, I think we make more progress in understanding the fate of the Southwest under conditions of aridity and water scarcity by looking at what’s happening now, in the places that are really running short of water. What are people actually doing today?

Which is why the Imperial Valley of southern California is on my radar, as it negotiates the minefield of ag-urban transfers:

The Imperial Irrigation District is looking for water, and a new subcommittee is being created to find a solution.

The district is now accepting its second round of solicitation applications for its 2012-2013 fallowing program. The district has reopened the application process, mailed notices out and is hoping to get a good response to make up water for the July 1, 2011, through June 30, 2012, fallowing cycle, said Tina Shields, assistant water department manager. The payment rate has also been increased from $85 per acre-foot to $100 per acre-foot.

Commodity prices and the economics of fallowing

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One of the most promising strategies for water conservation in the arid west involves fallowing of agricultural lands. Done badly, it has earned the pejorative nickname “buy and dry”, as cities buy up ag water rights, take the land out of production and shift the water to urban toilets and taps. But done right – the fallowing agreement between the Metropolitan Water District and the Palo Verde Irrigation District is an oft-cited example – it can compensate farmers and keep ag economies robust and healthy.

Brett Walton at Circle of Blue explores an intriguing example in the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado – fallowing some crop land in the valley to save water for other farms. So instead of farm-to-city, this is fallowing one farm to save another. But he also highlights a problem in this year of extraordinary commodity prices:

Though it is still being negotiated, the plan has a significant obstacle: the explosive rise in food prices, which are making the sums offered by the water-conservation program less enticing. Prices for the valley’s mainstay — potatoes — have increased 25 percent in the last five years. Wheat, alfalfa, and barley prices have done even better, more or less doubling over the same period.