The power generated enables a modern wonder. It drives a set of pumps 325 miles down the Colorado River that heave trillions of gallons of water out of the river and send it shooting over mountains and through canals. That water — lifted 3,000 vertical feet and carried 336 miles — has enabled the cities of Phoenix and Tucson to rapidly expand.
.. In a series of reports, ProPublica has examined how the West’s water crisis is as much a product of human error and hubris as it is of nature.
.. But in pushing for dramatic changes at the Navajo plant, the EPA underestimated how intertwined the plant had become with every aspect of life in the region — from providing its power to moving its water to buttressing the tribal economy
.. The West is full of people like him. Indeed, as the region gets more crowded, drier and hotter, there is talk not of living within the current constraints but of engineering new ways to gather additional supplies of water. The West must continue to grow, Kyl says, or it will begin slipping backward. He thinks it will be necessary to shoot silver iodide into the clouds in an effort to make it rain or to build plants to desalt ocean water.
.. Wockner and others say the elaborate projects built along the river amount to expensive distractions. The more permanent solution: Put the Colorado’s limited water to the best purpose, by planting more efficient crops, irrigating with modern equipment, writing laws that incentivize conservation, and reducing energy spent moving water over large distances.
Silicon Valley’s Water Conservation Conundrum
The Valley’s investors learned a hard lesson — that energy technologies often required larger investments and had longer development cycles than they would have liked. And when the market for solar panels was flooded by low-cost Chinese competitors, the “change the world” mantra of the venture capital community moved on to focus on social networking, software and other Internet investments.
The water crisis simply may be a poor match for the Valley’s skill set.
.. The solutions may have more to do with changing policy than technology breakthroughs at this stage.
“Water is not a rational market today,” said Brook Porter, a partner in Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers Green Growth Fund. The problems, he said, include inefficient or nonexistent pricing mechanisms, and regulatory bodies that may be resistant to change.
.. He argues that the Valley has excelled in creating new markets rather than satisfying crying needs in existing ones.
The Economics of California’s Drought
California is the world’s fifth-largest supplier of food, a big reason why the state would, if an independent country, be the 7th largest economy in the world.
.. Irrigation claims up to 41 percent of the state’s water supply, while cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco demand comparatively little. Crops such as almonds, grown exclusively in California in the United States, consume 600 gallons of water per pound of nuts, more than 25 times the water needed per pound of tomato. These water-intensive crops tend to have high profit margins, providing farmers with an incentive to plant them.