When Will Lake Mead Go Dry?
Exposed turbine intakes and the "bathtub ring" at Lake Mead. Photo: Craig Miller
You can see a slide show of the retreating waters at Lake Mead and Hoover Dam and listen to my radio feature from The California Report. Also, The American Experience will rerun its documentary on Hoover Dam, Monday night on most PBS stations.
The Las Vegas Sun has a digital clock on its website, counting down to a theoretical doomsday when the city's principal source of water would go dry. Wagering on that question may not have found its way into the sports books on the Strip–but it did become a lively pastime among engineers and hydrologists, when a report emerged from San Diego's Scripps Institution, with a dire forecast. The paper, by climate physicist Tim Barnett, put the odds at 50-50 that Lake Mead, the giant reservoir behind Hoover Dam, would reach "dead pool" by 2017. That's the point at which the dam shuts down and neither hydroelectric power nor water emerges from it.
The Barnett study "definitely raised eyebrows throughout the basin," admits Terry Fulp, deputy director of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Lower Colorado Region, which operates Hoover Dam and Lake Mead. As it turns out, Barnett was a bit pessimistic. Subsequent work by him and others revealed that he overestimated the evaporation rate at Lake Mead, and omitted inflows below a certain point on the river.
The bottom line, according to Balaji Rajagopalan at the University of Colorado: Doomsday is not quite that near at hand. But that doesn't mean it's not on the horizon. "After 2027, the demand increase outpaces the supply decrease," Rajagopalan told me in a recent interview. "And that’s why much of the risk explodes from 2027 to 2057."
All of these studies are couched in probabilities, much in the same way that the Corps of Engineers talks about a "100-year" flood. Rajagopalan says: "Even in our study, we have a 50% risk [of dead pool], but that occurs in 2057. And that makes a big difference in terms of water managers, what they can do."
One of those managers is Pat Mulroy, who directs the Southern Nevada Water Authority. Her constituents rely on Lake Mead for 90% of their water, so she says she's not inclined to wait around for a consensus. "I mean, during the entire period of the ‘90s when we were bickering with our friends in the lower basin over surpluses, there was zero probability that the drought that we’re currently in was going to happen," Mulroy told me. "I’ve lost confidence in probabilities."
The Bureau's Fulp says the Colorado system leans heavily on the huge water storage capacity of Lake Mead and its sister reservoir upstream, Lake Powell. "We’ve known for decades that this system is highly variable and that’s why so much storage was built." When filled to capacity (which it was, more or less, 10 years ago), Lake Mead alone can hold enough to put an area the size of Pennsylvania under a foot of water. But a 10-year drought has left Mead at just over 40% of capacity (so think of flooding something more the size of Costa Rica). Just as current evidence and climate models both point toward lessening flows on the Colorado, many parts of the southwest still see relatively high population growth.
Scientists continue to run their statistical models aimed at handicapping the Colorado's demise as a dependable bringer of water. But as Fulp sums it up, "It’s really a debate about when. It’s not really 'if."
I regret an error of my own that appeared in the radio feature. I misstated the number of people in southern Nevada who are dependent on water from the Colorado. The correct number is about two million.
An Hour with Amory Lovins
In case you missed it amid the flurry of climate-related news last week: On September 30, Amory Lovins, founder and chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute, and an honest-to-goodness energy guru to many, spent an hour in conversation with Michael Krasny and callers to KQED's Forum program. You can listen to the entire archived broadcast or scan some of the highlights here, compiled by Climate Watch intern David Ferry.
On China:
"We can count on China to lead the world out of the climate mess…Even though the U.S. has led the world in wind installations the past three years, this year China’s going to pass us so fast we won’t even hear them go by. China’s doubled its wind installation each of the past four years, and there’s a new paper in Science from Harvard and Tsinghua in September saying that China can meet all its electric needs–not the growth but the total–till at least 2030, cost effectively, from its wind resources."
On Nuclear Power:
"Basically nuclear and coal plants are getting walloped in the global marketplace by efficiency and renewables and cogeneration because they’re a lot cheaper and they have less financial risk so they can attract private investment."
Grading the Obama Administration on Renewables:
"Greatly improved and I think on the whole doing very well."
On the Upcoming UN Climate Talks in Copenhagen:
"I’m cautiously optimistic…But remember that governments are usually the last to figure these things out. Most governments still think climate protection is costly. They haven’t figured out yet that economic theorists got the sign wrong and actually climate protection is profitable. Once you change the conversation from cost, burden and sacrifice to profit, jobs and competitive advantage it makes the politics a whole lot easier."
On Energy Efficiency & Steve Chu's "Low-Hanging Fruit" metaphor:
"The technologies keep improving faster than we use them, so efficiency is an ever bigger and cheaper source–it’s as if the 'low hanging fruit' had fallen on the ground; it’s mushing up around the ankles, it’s spilling in over the tops of our boots and the efficiency tree keeps dumping more fruit on our heads."
On Large-Scale Solar Farms v. "Distributed" Power Generation:
"The sun is distributed for free. Why gather it in one place and then pay to spread it out again? The National Renewable Energy Lab says if we put solar cells on seven percent of the structures in this country it would run all our electric needs without using any land. And for that matter, the wind potential on available windy land in this country is several times our total electric need and the footprint is actually very small."
On Whether Climate Change is Irreversible:
"There are a half-dozen known mechanisms of rapid climate change. Several of them show like they may be starting up, so it’s urgent to reverse that…we have plenty of technology already available to stabilize climate to the extent that irreversible changes have not already started. We don’t know what that extent is, so we ought to go full bore on best buys first and hope that we're in time."
You can also take a virtual tour of Lovins’ home in Colorado, which doubles as a laboratory for energy innovation.
A Climate of Quietude
This week conservationists issued their annual list of the "most endangered" national parks, including two in California (Joshua Tree and Yosemite). There are many ways to measure the health of a park; the air, the water. This week on Quest radio, I examine an often overlooked vital sign: the sound. Thanks to Climate Watch contributor Sasha Khokha, Bob Roney, Bernie Krause and the staff at NPS Ft. Collins for many of the sounds you hear in that segment, nicely mixed by Ceil Muller.
Sand dune near Stovepipe Wells, Death Valley. Photo: Craig Miller
The quietest place I've ever been was in a national park and I don't think I'll ever forget what it was like.
Okay, "quiet" is a somewhat subjective thing. When I lived on the upper (way upper) west side of Manhattan in the 1980s, any interval without hearing a car alarm seemed like blessed relief. Quiet can be measured, of course, with sound pressure meters. Anything below about 40 decibels is pretty darn quiet for most people's purposes (a state that I doubt was ever attained in my apartment on West 119th St.).
The National Park Service (NPS) says the quietest place it has yet measured is a spot in Great Sand Dunes National Park, where Vicki McCusker, who helps oversee the natural sounds program for the Park Service, says it was "bottoming out" their meters.
I've never been there but it's hard to imagine greater quietude than an afternoon I spent in Death Valley. Coincidentally this was also on a sand dune, near Stovepipe Wells. It was also Christmas Day, which kept the tourist traffic to a minimum. It was at a point in my life when I was in desperate need of some deep introspection, so I parked my car along Highway 190 and trekked into the dunes, found an accommodating slope and sat down. Occasionally a fly (or something) would buzz by. Other than that, the loudest thing was the buzzing in my own head, which I can only hope would've been inaudible to anyone with me.
Looking across the dunes in Death Valley. Photo: Craig Miller
It's interesting how, when things get really quiet, our bodies try to make up for it with ringing ears and internal chaos. The noted bioacoustician Bernie Krause talks about the time he and his wife, Kat were hosting guests from New York, who literally had to leave the Krause's semi-secluded Glen Ellen "sanctuary" because the night-time quiet was creeping them out.
I asked Krause what he could draw from that. "Well, it tells me that we’re more insane than I ever thought in the first place," he mused. "I mean, we’re definitely verging on pathological. Because it’s exactly those kinds of sounds–the urban acoustic envelope in which we enfold ourselves–that kind of urban noise that’s driving up the numbers of prescriptions for Prozac."
Surveys of national park visitors would seem to bear that out. In the early 1990s, NPS surveyed 15,000 visitors in 39 parks, about noise issues (NPS manages 391 "units" nationwide, 58 of which are designated as "parks"). More than nine out of ten visitors surveyed cited "enjoyment of natural quiet" as a reason for visiting. This survey provided some juice for the ongoing natural sounds program in the parks.
An open question is: where does it go from here? Much of the current effort in the parks appears to be geared toward developing "air tour management plans," a response to concerns that first arose over the increasingly crowded skies above the Grand Canyon. McCusker told me that while aircraft overflights are the most pervasive noise issue across the parks, the most common complaint is probably over loud motorcycles (note to "straight-pipe" Harley owners).
Krause, who conducted a year-long project documenting soundscapes in Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park, hopes the research will also be used to develop new rules governing on-the-ground noise pollution. "If the parks can set aside places where people can go and hear the natural world as it is, at any season of the year, then that will be a really big benefit for visitors coming to the parks," he says. "Otherwise, you’re seeing the parks with the wrong soundtrack. It’s like watching Star Wars without a soundtrack."
Leave a comment with your own "quietest place."
In 2003, Bernie Krause & I co-produced a short film for the National Park Service, which takes you on a 4-and-a-half-minute journey from the "urban sound envelope" to a restful spot in Sequoia National park.
Tune in to PBS this week for the premiere of Ken Burns' new series: The National Parks: America's Best Idea. Also Quest television explores the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, an urban national park. This program is now available for viewing at the Quest site (see previous link).
Not Connecting the Dots
Two developments this week would seem to validate concerns that things aren't quite lining up for the vaunted new age of renewable energy.
While the Secretaries of Energy and Interior were offering confident assurances to a Senate panel about the future of renewables, a consortium of environmental groups was suing them over a plan for major new transmission lines for the western electrical grid.
The groups, represented by lawyers at Oakland-based EarthJustice, produced their own maps to show that the proposed routes appear to miss many areas with the most potential for solar, wind and geothermal resources. Instead, environmentalists say the West-wide Energy Transmission Corridors approved under the Bush administration would seem to line up just about perfectly with major existing and proposed coal-fired power plants (note that the maps themselves are PDF downloads).
According to EarthJustice:
"The Bush corridors plan ignores the Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) adopted by nine of the eleven western states to increase use of the region's vast wind, solar, and other forms of renewable energy. The approximately 6,000 miles and 3.2 million acres of federal land in eleven western states designated as energy corridors puts imperiled wildlife at risk and slices or brushes against the borders of iconic public lands. Among these are Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Arches National Park, and New Mexico's Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge."
I asked Katie Renshaw, a Washington-based lawyer for EarthJustice, if Energy and Interior wouldn't have updated their plans since the Bush-era maps were approved. "As far as we've seen, they haven't," said Renshaw. "An analysis was never really completed."
The lawsuit comes just days after energy entrepreneur T. Boone Pickens revealed that he's having to reconsider his plans for a major network of wind turbines through Texas. The reason: no transmission lines.
In California and elsewhere, proposed transmission lines have run afoul of environmental interests, as Rob Schmitz reported in his New Gridlock series for Climate Watch.
Update: Scott Streater has more on the controversy over siting renewables in a New York Times Greenwire post.
Mapping Out Solar Power Hotspots
Somewhat overtaken by the other headlines of the week, dominated by celebrity obits and California's financial meltdown, was the release by federal agencies of some new solar maps. They pinpoint federal lands in seven western states that present–in the government's view–some of the best potential for building out utility-scale solar power production.
The four California locations (.pdf link) combine more than 350,000 acres in San Bernardino, Riverside and Imperial Counties. They supposedly represent the best combination of production potential, least conflict with other land uses and environmental concerns, and proximity to existing transmission lines or power plants. Areas were also mapped in neighboring Nevada and Arizona.
Update: Scott Streater has more on the controversy over planned renewable power sites, including California's Iron Mountain site (see map, below), in a New York Times Greenwire post.
All California locations are on BLM property in the state's southeastern deserts. Image: DOE/BLM
The maps appeared just as California's main regulator of power companies issued an update on solar projects in the state. The California Public Utilities Commission reported that the rate of new solar installations nearly doubled last year, from 2007 levels.
The CPUC tally shows California with over 500 MW of solar photovoltaic (PV) connected to the electric grid at almost 50,000 customer sites. The report notes that all those electrons combined are equivalent to one large power plant. About half of the current total went in under the California Solar Initiative, which has reached 13% of it's 10-year goal, with another 8% in pending applications.
Also this week, more than $300 million fell from the federal money tree for a hydrogen power project in southern California. Cash from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (better known as the federal stimulus plan) will flow to the Hydrogen Energy California (HECA) project in Bakersfield. The project is designed to provide power for 150,000 homes in the area, by converting oil to hydrogen.
A statement from the California Recovery Task Force (CRTF), a conduit for federal stimulus funds, describes the HECA project as "an Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle power plant that will take petroleum coke, biomas, coal or blends of each, combined with non-potable water to convert them into hydrogen and carbon dioxide (CO2). The hydrogen gas will be used to fuel a net 250-megawatt power station."
Perhaps more significant are the plans for the carbon dioxide generated in burning the oil. The CRTF statement says that "The CO2 will be transported by pipeline to nearby oil reservoirs and injected for permanent storage which will enhance U.S. energy security and enable additional production from existing California oilfields."
CRTF says the project will "avoid" emissions of more than two million tons of greenhouse gases per year.
Renewables Meet NIMBY…Everywhere
Suddenly, everywhere you look nowadays, prospects for clean, green energy are being muddied by NIMBY* syndrome.
Wind farm: Windmills dwarf a dairy barn in upstate New York. Photo: Craig Miller
We saw it first-hand in Rob Schmitz's series on "green gridlock" in California's southeastern deserts. Trepidation there turns more on the transmission lines that would have to go up, to connect solar, wind and geothermal fields to population centers where the power is needed.
We've seen it at work in efforts to license wave power projects along the West Coast.
In Marin County, it took the McEvoy Ranch nine years from concept to completion, to get one 150-foot windmill up and running, to power the olive operation. Objections from the neighbors forced them to move the site more than a half-mile, and downsize the turbine to three quarters the proposed height and one third the power output (more about this in the next Quest/Climate Watch special, to premiere on August 25).
Now, as James Glanz reports in the New York Times, seismic fears are causing tremors in geothermal fields north of San Francisco.
Glanz writes that with venture funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Google, Sausalito-based AltaRock Energy is deploying "enhanced" geothermal technology to wrest more steam from the earth. But fears over the potential for unleashing earthquakes in the process are not enhancing their prospects.
*For the truly uninitiated: "Not in My Back Yard"
Decoding California's Drought History
Abbie Tingstad is a paleoclimatologist at UCLA. She specializes in reconstructing drought records in the western United States, and takes us along on some of her field research in this guest post:
Part of a Piñon pine beam under a collapsed rock shelter. This beam was one of several sampled for tree ring analysis. Photo by Abbie Tingstad.
By Abbie Tingstad
The site was so remote we needed a team of archaeologists and a couple of heavy-duty 4×4s to get us there.
Deep within the rocky piñon-juniper cliffs of northwestern Colorado was a secret so well hidden I didn’t see it until I was physically inside, face-to-face with a series of hand prints made over a thousand years ago. This rock shelter was occupied during Medieval times by Fremont Indians, contemporaries of the Anasazi whose cultural center was further south in the Four Corners Region. The site had already been excavated, but our interest as dendroclimatologists was not in artifacts. We had come to take samples from the ancient piñon and juniper beams that once supported this structure for the valuable paleoclimate information contained within their annual growth rings.
Tingstad sampling a live Piñon pine tree in northeastern Utah. This tree is about 550 years old. Photo by Glen MacDonald.
Gathering Medieval climate information from tree rings, lake sediments, and other natural climate archives in the Western US is critically important for understanding the implications of increasing temperatures in this region, particularly when it comes to future water supply and demand.
Research has confirmed that temperatures rose in the Western U.S. from about A.D. 800-1300, which translated into a series of droughts. The most devastating of these occurred in the mid-11th and 12th Centuries, when dry conditions persisted for several decades and may have contributed to the collapse of the Anasazi and Fremont cultures.
Paleoclimate data from tree rings and other sources also suggest that the mechanism driving drought during the "Medieval Warm Period" was eastern Pacific Ocean cooling. Like a widespread, extended La Niña event, cool sea surface temperatures may have strengthened the persistent moisture-blocking system of high-pressure off the West coast, nudging storm tracks north.
While the Medieval period is an instructive analogue for the warming we are beginning to experience, it is an imperfect one. Two major factors separate the episode the Fremont and Anasazi experienced a thousand years ago from what we are just beginning to undergo today. First, Medieval warming appears to have been fostered by a combination of increased solar irradiance and decreased volcanic activity, rather than anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Secondly, Medieval times were characterized mainly by summer warming, while winter and spring temperatures are expected to increase most dramatically in the future. These differences manifest themselves in many ways, but notable for the water-starved West are the implications for decreased winter snowpack and earlier spring river discharge.
The Medieval Warm Period may not offer a precise preview of our future, but it serves as a valuable warning about the tenuous balance of water supply and demand in California and the Western US, something the occupants of the Fremont rock shelter we visited were likely aware of.
Since the turn of the new Millennium, drought has been the norm rather than the exception in this region and the end is not in sight: As of May 1, 2009 surveys suggest that the Sierra Nevada snowpack is two-thirds of normal. What we can learn from Medieval times is not to expect "normally" moist conditions to return any time soon, and to plan accordingly.
The Insidious Side of Climate Change
If you think climate change just means hotter summers in California, think again. The writer of this week's guest post argues that we'll all "feel the heat" in myriad ways, both obvious and subtle.
Climate and Nature
by Anthony Barnosky
Some impacts of climate change in California are pretty obvious, things like rising sea level submerging large parts of the San Francisco Bay region, or drought cutting into our water supplies. Less obvious, but every bit as important, are impacts on something you probably don’t even know you have: your relationship with nature.
One part of that relationship is the concept of "ecosystem services;" the direct benefits you get from nature. California’s Climate Action Team highlighted some of the state’s ecosystem services in their recent report. Examples include the ski trip you may have taken this winter, the salmon fillet you may have bought at the grocery store, or surprisingly, even your hamburger.
Snow will be less, soggier, at higher elevations, and on the ground for fewer days of the winter, melting some of the $500 million-per-year revenues of the ski industry–not to mention melting your favorite ski run. Altered river dynamics and temperatures will almost certainly cut into the state’s $33-million-per-year salmon industry. Climate-caused loss of forage means that in 2070 California’s cattle ranchers will be losing up to $92 million in comparison to today’s markets, which means higher beef prices at the grocery store. Combined, the losses in these ecosystem services likely will cost the state’s already suffering economy well over a hundred million dollars per year as we move into the next few decades. And those are just three of many ecosystem services that will be affected.
A second part of your relationship to nature is the species around you, that is to say, biodiversity. Simply put, biodiversity is which species live in a place, and the extent to which those species are rare or common. In general, biodiversity means more productive and healthier ecosystems, which translates as more benefits to humans that inhabit those areas. As it turns out, California is a globally recognized biodiversity hotspot, unique in the world. But biodiversity losses from global warming promise to be severe: one study predicts that two-thirds of the 2387 plant species found only in the state will lose 80% of their range within the century.
The third part of your relationship to nature is how it makes you feel. There’s no question: you can’t get the same feeling you get looking at a giant redwood anywhere but in a redwood forest. Among species that may have little or no suitable climate left in California, however, are its coastal redwoods and sequoias.
Such impacts of climate change on nature are not confined to California. Many other reports indicate that global warming is redefining our relationship to nature worldwide. As with other impacts, this one can be partially mitigated by reducing greenhouse gas emissions immediately, but also will require some new management strategies for preserving nature in the age of global warming. California, in particular, has a lot to lose.
Anthony D. Barnosky is a Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley and author of the recently published Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming. You can read more on this topic in his blog. Photos by the author.
Barnosky is scheduled to appear Saturday as part of Berkeley's "Cal Day" activities. His talk is scheduled for noon at the Valley Life Sciences Bldg, Room 2060, followed by a book-signing at the T-Rex (which is hard to miss).
Possible Detour on the "Electron Superhighway"
It appears that almost 200,000 acres of Mojave Desert will be under federal wilderness protection now that Congress passed the Omnibus Land Management Act of 2009.
Much more was set aside throughout California, as I report in my radio story for The California Report.
Now, Senator Dianne Feinstein is eyeing almost a million additional acres in the Mojave off of old Route 66 between Ludlow and Needles.
There are currently 163 proposed renewable energy projects for federal lands in the Mojave Desert region. Nineteen of them are slated for the land Senator Feinstein wants to set aside. If energy companies can’t build on that land, it follows that they’ll try to build it in the land that’s left.
And that’s got a lot of people who live in the unprotected areas of the Mojave worried. Not only are most of the state’s large-scale renewable energy projects planned for this region, but as I explored in a recent two-part series for Climate Watch, there’s also a transmission corridor in the works to carry that power to Los Angeles.
Use the player below to listen to my conversation with Jim Harvey, who heads the Alliance for Responsible Energy Policy, about what all of this new land protection means for environmentalists like him.
Oh, No–Another "Superhighway"
Just when we could exhale, assured that the term "Information Superhighway" had faded mercifully into the rear-view mirror–at the signpost up ahead: Your next stop: the "Electron Superhighway."
That's the term that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is using to describe the transmission web that will facilitate the nation's transformation to clean energy. Some random notes from his (and others') appearance today before the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee:
Salazar:
- 6,000 miles initially identified on BLM lands for new transmission lines on the "Electron Superhighway," 1,000 on US Forest Service lands.
- Access to land for transmission will be the "Achilles heel" of the plans for a new clean-power grid.
- Oil & gas need to be part of a "comprehensive energy plan," along with renewables. The US now imports 70% of its oil.
- Seven major onshore leases already approved, auctioning off another 34 million acres along the Gulf Coast this week.
Ron Wyden (D-OR):
- Let's use the "backlog of deadly fuels" on the floor of federal forests to generate bio-fuels and reduce fire danger at the same time (Energy Act of 2000 apparently excluded forest slash from its definition of "biomass.")
- Hydrokinetic (wave & tidal) power should be higher on the priority list for energy development.
John McCain (R-AZ):
- The Obama administration "has effectively killed nuclear power in the foreseeable future, for this country" (by its actions regarding Yucca Mountain and reprocessing of fuel).
Phil Moeller, FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission):
- Wave & tidal power could potentially fill 10% of the nation's energy portfolio.
Joanna Prukop, NM Secretary of Energy, Minerals & Natural Resources:
- Wind energy is now price-competitive with natural gas (about 5 cents/KW-Hour currently) and could thrive without federal subsidy. Solar, not so much.
Dan Arvizu, Director, Nat'l Renewable Energy Lab:
- Used the term "smart grid" one hour and 38 minutes into the hearing, the first and only time it was mentioned.
You can view the entire webcast at the DOI archive.
By the way, Salazar will hold a public hearing on energy policy in San Francisco on April 16th. It'll start at 9 a.m. at UCSF's Mission Bay Conference Center.
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