Latest conservation technology, the “water meter”, sweeps British Isles

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From the Telegraph:

Water companies across a third of the country will be required to consider fitting all properties in their areas with a water meter and billing customers for every drop they use.

Under the order, approved this week by Owen Paterson, the Environment Secretary, some family water bills could double.

It follows warnings from the Government’s environment specialists that climate change and England’s growing population will put the future supply of water in reservoirs and rivers under “serious stress”.

This innovation is apparently based on some clever new work by a British academic named Adam Smith who has just recently discovered that consumption of a scarce good is influenced by the price charged. The striking implication is that if you charge people a flat rate for a commodity like water, regardless of how much they use, some people will install “power showers”.

Before we abandon LA because of water shortages, we’ll do this

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From Juliet McKenna, another example of the lengths to which southwestern municipalities will go to adapt to shrinking water supply:

LA’s plan calls for building one of the country’s largest groundwater treatment systems at one of its largest Superfund sites. Groundwater in the San Fernando basin has elevated levels of chromium, perchlorate, nitrates, and trichloroethylene — the result of decades of industrial operations. Ultimately, the two required treatment plants are expected to be operational by 2022. By 2035, the utility expects that this treated groundwater can be used to reduce the amount of water it imports by a factor of one-half.

Building treatment plants is a costly proposition, but the alternative — relying on imported supplies — is no bargain either. MWD’s water wholesale delivery rates, which have nearly doubled since 2006, will approach $900/AF in 2014. The project will be funded by ratepayers through low-interest bonds.

 

Colorado Basin – the demand side problem

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From Jay Lund, a comment on my post last week about low flows into that is worth elevating:

Perhaps a bigger issue is that average unimpaired flow appears to be < 11 maf, but total allocations are more than 16 maf/year (1.5 maf/yr for Mexico and 7.5 maf each for the upper-basin and lower-basin states). Mexico and the lower basin states already use their full allocations. As upper basin state use grows, water storage in the amazingly large Colorado R. reservoirs will diminish over time. We will blame droughts and climate change, but overallocation is a more than equal contributor to the problem. Improving allocations will have large economic benefits.

July rain: what a difference a month makes

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I got what may be my all time favorite reader comment a couple of weeks back when I tried to explain that the summer rains New Mexico has been getting do not mean our drought is over:

This article is miserablism at its absolute worst. How about looking at important progress in reservoirs like Conchas where water levels are up 6 feet – during the summer months? It’s pretty obvious you don’t reverse a ten year drought in a month, but looking at Elephant Butte and concluding nothing beneficial has occurred, when the rainwater hasn’t even made it that far yet, is just Fleck being his usual dismal self. If you don’t like living in a desert, why don’t you move??

I must admit I was a little worried when it started raining the first week in July. But once I realized I could write about storms ruining alfalfa and flooding neighborhoods and twist the knife with the “but the drought’s not over!” taunt, I knew I was golden. This is a once-in-a lifetime journalistic opportunity. Fleck the Miserablist, at your service.*

I loved the comment so much, I wrote the same story a week later, but my trolling failed.**

We got 3.09 inches (7.8 cm) of rain at our Albuquerque house in July. That’s our wettest month since August 2008. Still just 63 percent of average for the water year, but much better than it was.

2012-13 water year, Heineman-Fleck house

2012-13 water year, Heineman-Fleck house

* This paragraph is a joke. Its purpose is to poke fun at me and my profession, incentivized, as Danah Boyd argues, by fear and the attention economy.

** This paragraph also is a joke. I wrote the second story because the drought really is serious, and all available evidence suggests the rains have helped little, and public understanding seems an important thing. Plus fear economy.

Fourteen years of Colorado River Basin drought

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Here’s a striking graph distributed this week at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s 2014 Colorado River Annual Operating Plan consultation meeting in Las Vegas:

Lake Powell Unregulated Inflow, courtesy USBR

Lake Powell Unregulated Inflow, courtesy USBR

That’s annual unregulated* inflow into Lake Powell on the Colorado River. A couple of things worth noting:

  • 2012 and 2013 are two of only four years since Glen Canyon Dam was completed with inflows less than 5 million acre feet
  • Only three of the 14 years from 2000 to the present have had above average inflows into Lake Powell
  • Three of the four lowest years on record have occurred during the current drought

This data isn’t new, it was just striking to me to see this graphical representation.

* “unregulated inflow” involves an estimate of what the natural inflow into Lake Powell would have been absent upstream dams and diversions