Water is life. It's also energy, whether you love dams or hate them

The rain and snow that has fallen on California and much of the American West over the past few months – at least relative to some of the severe drought years we have seen recently – is a boon not only for water supplies, but also for energy.

Or maybe it's a curse (of energy, not water). It depends on who you ask.

Much of the electricity that powers lights, refrigerators and cell phones comes from rivers, whose once free-flowing waters flow behind dams and flow through hydroelectric turbines. Colorado River, Columbia, Sacramento, and San Joaquin Rivers – generate about a quarter of the region's power. In dry years, which become drier due to climate change, less water flows through these rivers. As a result, energy companies burn more natural gas, a fossil fuel, making climate change worse.

So, it's good that we got relatively more rain and snow this year. right?

“We don't have to choose between free-flowing rivers and clean energy,” Kyle Roernick said.

As I mentioned earlier, hydropower dams are certainly no saint of the environment. They disturb ecosystems and kill fish, even as the companies that manage them try to minimize deaths. The tanks behind them release large amounts of methane, a powerful gas that traps heat. This does not make dams as climate harmful as fossil fuels. But that means they're not as good as solar panels or wind turbines, which have almost zero emissions.

For Roerink — executive director of the Great Basin Water Network, an environmental group that works in Nevada and Utah — the solution is not to tear down all the dams. But he believes some of the worst offenders will have to go, even as others continue to produce energy that has become increasingly valuable for avoiding blackouts during heat and cold waves.

“We have to adapt as climate continues to put new obstacles in the way of society,” Roerink told me.

This conversation becomes especially urgent in late summer and early fall, when rising temperatures increase air conditioner use and strain the power grid. So let's have the conversation now, in March, when it's not so hot and we're not panicking.

First things first: California had a rainy winter.

We'll have a better sense of the hydropower outlook in a few weeks, when the state Department of Water Resources conducts a much-watched April 1 snow survey (already scheduled for April 2 this year). But water storage in California's major reservoirs was 117% of average on Wednesday, and statewide snowpack was 105% of normal. These numbers bode well for power generation at Oroville Dam, Shasta Dam and other hydroelectric giants in the state.

High clouds and the Sierra Nevada are reflected in a resurgent Owens Lake on February 14.

(Brian Van Der Brug/Los Angeles Times)

Dennis Obiang, director of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, told me the agency expects to produce about 500 gigawatt-hours of electricity this year from the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which carries water to the city from the Owens Valley — two and a half years. Multiple times what the channel produces during a “normal” year. This is largely due to the heavy snowfall in the Sierra Nevada.

This means reducing the need to operate four polluting gas plants in the Los Angeles Basin when it gets hot and Angelenos turn on their air conditioners — including a particularly controversial gas plant surrounded by a largely low-income San Fernando Valley community that until Then 2020 methane leaks last for at least three years.

“Snow and rain accumulation are very important,” Obiang said.

More water, more climate-friendly energy – and less fossil gas. As long as we keep stopping the rivers.

Meanwhile, rain and snow in the Colorado River Basin have been good so far this year, but not as good as in California. Even after some great rain in 2023, Lake Mead and Lake Powell — Colorado's largest reservoirs — are still very low. The seven states that depend on water from these reservoirs are still striving to reach an agreement to prevent them from collapsing.

Overall, we shouldn't expect a significant increase in hydropower production on the Colorado River this year, according to Eric Kuhn, retired Colorado state water director. Although slightly higher water levels at Mead and Powell would increase production a bit — more water behind the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams would mean more stress on the turbines, leading to increased electricity generation — dam managers will do everything in their power to do so. They sought to reduce releases. And build water levels back up.

This is important for the Golden State, which relies on the Hoover Dam not only for water but also for energy.

“The amount of energy you can produce at a dam depends on how much water you can release,” Cohen said.

In fact, they are all interconnected – water, energy, drought, climate, natural gas, heat waves, dams, and rivers. Everything.

I'll return to those distant musings in a minute. First, let's take a short trip to the Pacific Northwest.

Similar to the Colorado River system, the Columbia River and its tributaries have had not-terrible-but-not-quite-average rain and snow so far this winter. Snowfall was particularly below average in the Canadian mountains that typically keep the Columbia River flowing strongly during the summer, according to Bonneville Energy Department hydrologist Anne McManamon.

“We don't know if we're going to be saved by the spring rains or not,” McManamon said.

President Truman officially dedicated Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State in 1950. Pictured above are visitors to the dam hours before Truman's visit.

(News agency)

Before we get into the importance of water in late summer specifically, let's talk about Bonneville. It is a federal agency that sells electricity from the massive Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River, and from dozens of other dams across the watershed. Its leaders are fully aware that predicting weather phenomena of all kinds has become more difficult with global warming.

They also know very well that having more water behind dams makes it easier to pressure them during difficult weather situations.

This applies to Oregon and Washington, which rely on their dams to produce electricity for heat during cold snaps. That's also true for California, which used to rely on imports from Columbia River dams to help keep the lights on when it's hot here and the sun goes down and solar panels stop producing — a risky bet as the planet warms. The entire West is increasingly likely to be hot, and the fire may destroy power lines connecting California to the Pacific Northwest.

That was the mouth. Let's breathe for a second. The climate crisis, it's a lot. Slow down, collect our thoughts.

Well, the home stretch.

Ryan Egerdahl, director of energy planning at Bonneville, told me that if water conditions don't change much in Columbia over the next few months — which is still a big deal — there should be enough slack in the system to export some electrons to California later in the year. Overall, at least for a few hours here or there. This is good news, from the standpoint of avoiding power outages.

What's especially valuable about hydropower, for the people who run the electric grid, is that it can be there when they need it. If you have water behind a dam, all you have to do is open the gates and let the water flow through the dam – and voila, you have power. The sun is setting, but more people are still using air conditioning than you expected? Put some water through the dam. The wind is not blowing as strong as you expected? Put some water through the dam.

Dams are not the only technology capable of playing this role without fueling the climate crisis.

For example, one of the main reasons California has had no blackouts since 2020 is because we have added thousands of megawatts of lithium-ion batteries to the electric grid. Geothermal power plants can generate renewable electricity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The more we can reduce energy consumption – through steps such as buying more efficient appliances and using less water – the better.

“We are surrounded by opportunities,” Fred Huett said.

Hewitt is a senior policy associate at the NW Energy Coalition, a clean energy advocacy group based in Seattle. The opportunities he is most focused on include utilities and power grid operators doing a better job of sharing resources: finding ways to send solar, wind and hydropower from where it is available to where it is needed, thus reducing the need to spend huge sums of money – and wasting numbers. For many years – building massive new infrastructure projects across the western United States

The Green River, a tributary of the Colorado River, flows below Flaming Gorge Dam in Utah.

(Sammy Roth/Los Angeles Times)

I'll talk more about the people working to build a coordinated Western electricity market in an upcoming column. Whether this works or not, Hiot believes we need to do a better job of planning for years when hydroelectric power is disappointing.

“It helps when he's around, and we have to be more prepared than when he's not around,” he said.

Hydropower accounted for just under 6% of electricity in the United States last year. In California, the percentage has ranged from 5% to 17% over the past decade.

Find out what we know about the climate crisis – about how difficult it will be to keep the lights on as temperatures rise; About how difficult it is to build solar and wind farms; About research finding that rooftop solar will not be enough to power a community – do we really want to start tearing down the dams that provide so much energy and play a crucial role in avoiding blackouts?

You will have to answer this question yourself.

But it's worth thinking about it now, in March, when the electrical grid is no longer stressed. Then we might reconsider it in the fall, after there's been a big heatwave and we've all received emergency text messages begging us to use less energy, lest the lights go out.

another thing

Nancy Rivera Brooks.

(Ricardo Diaratana/Los Angeles Times)

Nancy Rivera Brooks worked at the Los Angeles Times for 42 years. For the past five, I've been fortunate to call her my editor and friend.

She's been editing on the Business Bureau since 2004, where she's helped countless reporters — I guess we could count them, but who has the time? – Ask better questions, write clearer sentences, and tell more meaningful stories. Her guidance has been especially valuable to me personally, as far as I'm concerned, because before she became editor she was an energy reporter like me. So when I post stories about the electric grid, utility regulation, and community choice aggregation, she knows exactly what I'm trying to say.

This is Nancy's last week at The Times, and she is retiring. Friday is her last day.

More importantly than her journalistic intelligence, Nancy is incredibly humble and kind. She declined my suggestion to devote this edition of Boiling Point to an interview with her about her 42 years at the Times. She would probably reluctantly allow this short poem.

Also important: Nancy, like me, is a huge Dodgers fan. So go Shuhei, go Kiki, go Clayton. Opening day is less than a week away.

Thank you for everything, Nancy.

This column is the latest edition of Boiling Point, an email newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. You can sign up for Boiling Point here. And for more climate and environment news, follow @Sammy_Roth on X.