The water-energy nexus spans the world of electricity generation and water movement, particularly in Western states. It takes water to produce steam for coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants, and they usually need water to cool them down. Huge amounts of electricity are needed to pump water across the desert; the Southern Nevada Water Authority is Nevada’s biggest user of electricity, and the Central Arizona Project relies heavily on the Navajo Generating Station to keep water moving through the canals. Surely the most obvious link between water and energy, and between climate and electricity generation, though, is found at the West’s numerous hydroelectric generation stations, and California — deep in a nasty drought — is feeling that link in a painful way.
The relationship is pretty simple: More water in a reservoir or river equals more potential for generating electricity by releasing that water to turn turbines. All of California’s reservoirs are far below the average levels for this time of year, so that the “bathtub rings” on many of them are bigger than the remaining water is deep. New Melones reservoir is sitting at just 17 percent of capacity; Shasta reservoir, one of the state’s biggest hydroelectric power plants, is only 49 percent full. Meanwhile, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, backed up behind the Southwest’s two biggest hydropower plants, are at critically low levels. This is impacting electricity generation, without a doubt, and doing so during the hottest months of summer, when the grid is already stressed.
We wanted to get a more concrete sense of exactly how the drought is affecting hydropower generation in California and beyond, so we dug into the data and crunched some of the numbers. The above map gives a rundown on the biggest hydropower generators in the Southwest, including all of California’s plants with a generating capacity of 200 megawatts or more, along with Glen Canyon Dam, Hoover Dam and Davis Dam on the Colorado River. Click on the icons and you’ll see a graph of power generation from 2009 through 2014. Here are the highlights of the number-crunch:
In California, drought has taken a direct hit on hydropower generation, as is quite evident in the map above, and the graph below. In 2014, California’s collective hydropower plants kicked out about 17 million megawatt hours of juice. Not bad, except that it was only about one-third of what they produced in 2011, an unusually wet year, and about half of an average year in pre-drought times. The average home uses about 11,000 kilowatt hours of power — or 11 megawatt hours — each year. In other words, something like 2.8 million fewer homes were powered by hydroelectricity in 2014 as compared to 2011 in California. And things have only gotten worse since. The good news is that burgeoning wind and solar in the state have stepped in and taken up some of the slack. The bad news is that more natural gas power has also been needed to fill the deficit.
If drought-induced hydropower loss is going to happen anywhere, California’s a good place for it. If any other state lost tens of millions of megawatthours of power from one source, they’d likely replace it with coal-fired power. But California is fast on its way to completely phasing out coal, and it’s also under the most robust renewable portfolio standards, so it can only get so dirty when looking for a stand-in for hydro.
Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor of High Country News.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
