An unsolved math problem on the Colorado River
coloradonewsline.com
coloradonewsline.com
Is there any way to keep the Lower Colorado River flowing? It may seem like
an engineering oversight not to have a way for that 815 billion gallons of
water trapped in deadpool to get past the dam. But as they say in the software
business, that’s a “feature” and not a “bug”.
Good article, thanks for the link.
Here's a project in Oregon where the original diversion tunnel plug was removed, to allow drawing cold water from the bottom of the lake to feed the river:
https://ndiastorage.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/ndia/2005/tr...
If I understand it correctly, had there been no dam, the river would already be dry.
It was estimated we could get an easy 12 GW (peak) from the aggregate of California canals, for much less money than, say, a 2GW nuke. Energy storage cost is plummeting even faster than solar, so making that a 2GW baseline is in easy reach.
2 they have more than enough peak power to desalinate as it stands. Even in the case that they wanted more, there are better places to site those solar resources than on those canals. (Which canals they'd be better off not using in the future in any case.)
The best choices for where to site solar panel farms have not been established.
Siting them over canals or floating in reservoirs, besides cutting evaporation and biofouling, makes them 3% more efficient; at 12 GW, that is an extra 360 MW you would not have got from them on a roof somewhere.
Siting them over farmland also makes them more efficient (perhaps less so) but improves crop yield by reducing heat stress and (again) water loss.
Not thinking a little bit ahead is what got all those states into the mess they are in today. California should definitely not assume a future where those canals are in use, and then base their power generation on that assumption.
Longer-term storage will be less round-trip-efficient media where the medium is industrially valuable and shippable, such as hydrogen, ammonia, liquified air, or even methane, and tankage is very cheap. Local tankage will be needed for not much longer than until the next shipment arrives from the tropics, as is done now with oil and LNG. Synthesis equipment will run at all times except when the tanks are being drawn down, generating revenue.
Power from long-distance transmission will usually be cheaper than drawing down on tanked storage that would then need to be re-filled, interrupting revenue.
Desalination will find itself in difficult competition, at large scale, with industrial moneymakers and long-distance transmission, but in places it will be an important sink.
But anyway California uses rather more than 12 GW during the peak of local solar generation.
In another decade, a bitcoin will be as valuable as a Cabbage-Patch doll.
Use the solar energy to pump water back up from the outgoing damn flow.
Agriculture - the ridiculous dream of the US Bureau of Reclamation from the 1930s - is what uses 70-80% of all the water.
One way moving to a region with more water will help is if there is a collapse of society, where you need to grow your own food.
The other part is just the experience. Living in brown, dry, dusty lands with dried out lake beds, or algae blooms if there is water... it just got old. Growing population meant more traffic, more ticky-tacky housing developments. It just wasn't a fun place to live anymore, even if you can prove with statistics that it is survivable. Your life experience needs to be enjoyable.
My wife grew up in Wisconsin. That pretty much matches the way she would describe it at this point :)
Your wife is 100% right. I don't think I'd necessarily recommend it to people who are not from here.
In a society governed by law, the straightforward way to confiscate a regular benefit received by a particular group is to pay that group to forego their statutory right to that benefit. Until we pony up the cash to pay farmers to use less of the water they own, one concludes that the problem of low flows on the Colorado doesn't really concern TPTB.
I am not aware of anyone demonizing farmers. It's not demonizing farmers to note the evaporative loss caused by flood and spray irrigation - that's simply a fact. It's not demonizing farmers to note that the whole idea of turning the highly insolated SW into a garden for the nation was originated at a specific time and place, by a specific group of people who refused to be curious about water. It's not demonizing farmers to note that the practice of growing crops for export is effectively the same as exporting water.
But yes, cooperation in pursuit of mutal goals is a great idea. One approach that I think has a lot of promise is a system that affects the purchase of water rights for municipal use, from farmers. The purchasing city pays some amount for the water rights, but then throws in a substantial additional payment to cover the capital cost of the farmer converting to drip irrigation. Everybody wins!
I'm just trying to be practical here, but perhaps there are interests served by avoiding obvious practical solutions.
Places with adequate levels of rainfall to grow crops without irrigation (even if irrigation may improve yield) generally do not have any concept of water rights. Water is considered to be a common good, like sun, wind, though more administered by conventional government means (whatever they might be in a particular part of the world).
This is true of places with less water also, though the level of regulation and control was generally higher because of the increased value of water. This was true in Nuevo Mexico too, which inherited the acequia system from the Spanish (who had in turn received/been pushed into it by the Moors).
The Valencia water court is one of the oldest still existing acequia systems in the world, and similar institutions used to exist across Spanish-controlled areas of north America.
But the arrival of the US ditched any notion of communal control over who would receive water and when and how much. NM in particular adopted a "first in time, first in right" approach, in which water rights were established simply by pre-existing water use. Such water rights cannot be modified to accomodate for droughts or other higher priority needs as they would be in an acequia system, or east of the Mississippi, where some governmental-ish agency would decide on regulations and allocation. Instead, water rights in the US west are treated as essentially god-given, based on acknowledged ownership of land. The fact that your use of water may be in opposition to the broader aims of society has no impact on your water rights.
This is likely to change over the next century (IMO), because it's just not viable in an era of reduced water availability. But for now, the system looks absolutely nothing like Roman regulation or the Valencia court syste (0).
(0) There is a dispute resoluton mechanism to address "excess water taking" in the western US, but it is never based on need or priority, merely established water rights.
For those reading along, see https://online.nmartmuseum.org/nmhistory/people-places-and-p... for sense of the cultural differences PaulDavisThe1st is talking about:
> American water law, which had been based largely on modified English Common Law practices, was developed east of the Mississippi River, where large amounts of rainfall virtually guaranteed an abundant water supply. East of the ninety-eighth meridian, agriculture could usually rely on adequate rainfall to insure sufficient crops. However, the area that the United States annexed as a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was largely arid, with few perennial rivers and very little rainfall. Any agriculture developed in this region would have to rely on irrigation, a system unfamiliar to many Americans.
> American political and social traditions further complicated the process. The American ideal of land distribution was deeply rooted in the belief of the sanctity of private property. This ideal celebrated the individual, independent farm and his family who cultivated the land on which they held legal ownership. At its basis, it reflected the assumption that abundant rainfall would support such independence. The belief in representative democracy as the supreme form of political organization was intimately related to this ideal. According to this perspective, independent farmers, owning their own land and free from economic servitude, voted for those leaders who they felt best represented their interests. The two credos of the United States, private property and republican democracy, deeply colored the view of those Americans who came to dominate the arid Southwest. ...
> ... Fearing a loss of democratic independence, many American leaders would have agreed with the army engineer William H. Emory that any system of irrigation “involves a degree of subordination, and absolute obedience to a chief, repugnant to the habits of our people.” ...
> ... the spirit of reluctant compromise did not completely erase the racial bigotries inherent in American culture. If white Americans in New Mexico found it necessary to incorporate aspects of the acequia system into their approach to water, they would change it to suit their worldview. One aspect of the acequia system that many white American leaders found offensive concerned the mayordomo. The mayordomo served as both local administrator and as a sort of water sheriff, whose duties included distributing water and commanding the mandatory labor of community inhabitants. To people raised on the rhetoric of independence and individualism, the mayordomo represented the worst aspects of a social system in which a few rich land owners lorded over an ignorant, dark-skinned peasantry. In 1895, the New Mexico territorial legislature dealt the traditional role of the mayordomo a deathblow by transferring his powers to ditch commissioners – a nod in the direction of science and efficiency. By the turn of the century, the entire acequia system would come under attack.
EDIT: also read "The Milagro Beanfield War" for a fictional account of New Mexico water rights issues.
Look at the Mexico city for an extreme example
The solutions thus far try to avoid runoff (surge irrigation) or recapture runoff. Nevertheless agriculture consumes a huge amount of water and in Colorado right now in effect the practice exports water.
There is a huge cost looming, whether change happens or not.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/322374/beyond-the-h...
My parents in the mountains aren't allowed to have potted plants unless they water them from water bottles. I'm not sure what the solution is, but by the numbers I'm convinced it's not "take shorter showers".
If that sounds flippant keep in mind that breaking this compact will be a footnote compared to the actual water wars that are going to be happening by 2050.
Also, it's not like "Temperatures have risen 3 degrees Celsius altogether since 1970" is meaningful outside of climate science.
These can be managed, but it's not "just" a matter of pumping the outflow directly back into the sea.