Craig Miller

The Yosemite Valley offers some of the most spectacular views in California. Some people would like to see the Hetch-Hetchy Valley restored to a similar state.

Over the past couple of weeks San Francisco’s water supply and fixed annual fees for that water have come under attack by Republican Congressmen from other parts of the state. The first parry came from Representative Dan Lungren who represents the area stretching east from Sacramento. Lungren has a self-proclaimed “love affair” with Yosemite and thinks it’s worth spending some money to find out if restoring the valley is feasible. On KQED’s Forum program, Lungren argued that, “The possibility that we might have a second Yosemite Valley is something that at least I believe ought to be looked at. And yet everyone who opposes us seems to be afraid of looking at the facts.”

The other big threat to San Francisco’s pristine water supply comes from Representative Devin Nunes, a Republican from Tulare county. The Bay Citizen’s John Upton reported this week that Nunes is proposing that Hetch-Hetchy fees be used for deficit reduction.

Rep. Devin Nunes, a Republican from Tulare, said the current low rent amounts to a federal subsidy for San Francisco’s water and electricity supply and is unfair to farmers in his heavily agricultural district, whose water supply is diminished. He proposed to Congress’ Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction that the city be made to pay a fee comparable to what the government sought to charge Southern California Edison to operate a reservoir in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.

The extra money would be a drip in the country’s deep financial hole, but it would drive up the city’s municipal power costs and reverberate through the water bills of 2.5 million Bay Area residents.

San Francisco pays a fixed rate of $30,000 per year to use Hetch-Hetchy as a reservoir, a rate set in 1913 by the federal Raker Act. Nunes has proposed raising San Francisco’s annual fee to $34 million. That’s million, not thousand.

The Raker Act is central to both of these attacks on San Francisco’s claim to Hetch-Hetchy. Lungren contends that San Francisco violates the law by not using its other water resources first and failing to use newer technologies to improve efficiency. Ed Harrington, general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, doesn’t buy that argument. He says that residential water users in San Francisco use only a third of the water that Orange County residents use and are some of the most conscientious water users in the state. ”I would put my money on San Francisco where we have done a lot of things to conserve the use of water as opposed to try and build new plants in Golden Gate Park and places like that to recycle it,” he told Forum.

“This idea that we are in violation of the Raker Act is simply not true,” Harrington said, in reaction to Lungren’s core complaint. He then made a historical argument about the intent of language around efficient use in the Raker Act. “There was a concern in the Central Valley that as we built Hetch-Hetchy we would bring water into the Bay Area for agricultural purposes,” he explained. He contends that Central Valley growers didn’t want competition, but that “the Congressman has chosen to stretch [that language] to make his point.”

This argument isn’t just about Republican Congressmen taking on Democratic San Francisco. There are plenty of environmentalists who agree that San Francisco should return the valley to its pristine state. “John Muir defined it as one of Nature’s rarest and most precious mountain temples,” says Mike Marshall of Restore Hetch-Hetchy, who also makes a climate argument for restoration. “When we talk about climate change we should look at ecological restoration as one of those issues,” he told Forum listners. “No one is really looking at our ability to absorb carbon.”

Craig Miller

A weathered sign in Fremont indicates that power comes from Hetch-Hetchy.

Opponents to Representative Lungren’s plan say that restoration has been proposed many times and rejected as too expensive and detrimental, both to the 30 Bay Area cities that use Hetch-Hetchy water and to the 400 megawatts of clean power generated by the dam and used to power big electrical consumers in San Francisco, like Muni and San Francisco General Hospital. And, they claim that removing the dam would undoubtedly cause damage to Yosemite Park itself.

Flickr/zoonabar

A UCS study says US power plants are sucking up three times the volume of water that goes over Niagara Falls on a daily basis.

For the second time in as many weeks, a major report has emerged warning of consequences from the demand that America’s electricity producers are placing on water supplies.

Today’s findings, from the Union of Concerned Scientists, conclude that water and power are on a collision course in the US, as nearly all major power plants slurp up water for cooling. As of 2008, the UCS study found that across the US, “thermocooled” power plants (which is most of them) took up somewhere between 60 billion and 170 billion gallons of water from rivers, lakes and aquifers. That’s three times the volume of water that pours over Niagara Falls. At least 2.8 billion and as much as 5.9 billion gallons of that was “consumed,” or not put back.

UCS

Power Plants are putting strain on watersheds throughout the nation, according to UCS researchers.

“It’s really water that keeps the lights on,” says Kristen Averyt, deputy director of the Western Water Assessment at the University of Colorado, and lead researcher for the report.

Coal, natural gas and nuclear plants — even some solar power plants — produce electricity by generating steam to power turbines (90% of the nation’s electricity is produced in this way), and require “vast volumes” of water for cooling. The authors say this, in turn, is putting stress on watersheds around the country.

UCS

Power plants vary widely in their "water intensity."

The good news is that California and Western plants tend to be less water-intensive than elsewhere in the nation, though the authors say that among Texas plants, nearly half the water used comes from underground aquifers. Here in California, many major power plants are located along the coast and use seawater. But all plants have one thing in common: they tend to put back the water much warmer than when they withdrew it.

“Fish can’t climb out of the hot tub,” says Rob Jackson, who studied the effects on water temperature from plant cooling for the UCS report. Jackson says that despite bans by several states on putting back water hotter than 90 degrees Fahrenheit, eleven of those states have power plants exceeding the limit. Jackson cited one plant in Florida, which was found to be returning water to the Manatee River at 115 degrees, literally Jacuzzi temperature.

The report also points to “significant gaps and errors” in industry figures that purportedly track water use by power plants.

The UCS authors singled out one California solar plant as a paragon of water-efficient design. The Ivanpah thermal-solar array, under construction by Oakland-based Brightsource Energy, will use a “dry-cooling” system. That seems prudent, as it’s located in the middle of the desert.