CONNECT THE DOTS

“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.” Mark Twain.

THE FACTS:

Seventy-one percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by ocean. That’s a lot of dam water. In July, the average ocean  surface temperature outside of the polar regions was recorded at 21.2C (70˚ F). Ryan Katz-Rosene, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Ottawa, put that in perspective when he said that this new record could be the high “for the entire Holocene period, possibly the last 125,000 years.” The Holocene period is the current geologic epoch, roughly the last 12,000 years after the last major ice age.

The western United States is suffering this year in the worst drought in record keeping.  Europe’s major rivers, the Rhine and Danube, are experiencing record low flows (and their records go way back). The Colorado River is on schedule to have its lowest flow in record keeping. NOAA announced that this July was tied for the hottest July on record.  Western Europe recorded the warmest June-July on record.

The hottest ten years in global temperature record keeping have been the last ten years. Since 2000, the Southwestern US has seen the hottest twenty-five years in history, and the driest twenty-six years out of the last 1,200 years.

The arctic is experiencing some of the highest July temperatures in history. Daily high temperatures reached 95˚F in Siberia and the European arctic. Glacial loss has transformed the Alps and Himalayas. This week’s horrific apparent glacial collapse that triggered the Nepal-Tibet flood that has taken thousands of lives is believed to been caused by rapid loss and failure of glacial ice.   

Nearly uniform predictions are that El Niῇo is on schedule to be the strongest of record. Ocean surface temperatures in the Pacific have reached 2.7C (4.86˚F) above normal. The amount of heat (energy) required to raise the surface temperature of over 2.5 million square miles of ocean is hard to fathom. And that added energy has to go somewhere.

            These are all facts. Facts are pesky. You can’t argue with them (that’s why they’re called facts). To deny them is to place oneself in the category of those that believe the Earth is flat, that the Covid vaccine has a tracking chip in it (our phones do that), that airplane exhaust leaves chemtrails, and that aliens walk among us.

            Now the good news. In 2021, renewables surpassed nuclear in electrical production. Renewables surpassed coal in 2025, and are scheduled to surpass natural gas by next summer. There are always those that cling to the past; some of the nation’s leaders (the US claims that title alone) openly war against renewables, but they’re ineffective and they will be left in the dust. The writing’s on the wall. The people, business, and free-market system know better. That’s why renewable energy growth is expected to average 11% annually this year and battery storage is projected to increase by 44% this year. US Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Connecting the dots has never been easier and it’s why while I may be pessimistic as to the climate, I’m optimistic that we will continue in the right direction, despite the junk you find in the news. Speaking of which, with all of the cluster in Washington, maybe it’s understandable to believe in that theory about aliens that walk among us.

THROWING FRESHWATER ON THE DUMB NEWS

Seventy-one percent of the Earth’s surface is water. The question many have is why then do we have a global water crisis? The answer is that 2.5%-3% of all water is freshwater; the balance is saltwater and brackish (salt-laden) water.  Why hasn’t the world focused on desalination if all around us is water?

Two simple reasons: 1)Desalination uses vast amounts of energy, which is expensive; and 2) disposal of the byproduct, brine. All that is on the cusp of changing.

Traditional desalination is by either a thermal process (heating water to steam and then distillation) or membrane filtration. Heating water to steam requires substantial energy. Forcing water by pumps through membranes also requires significant energy. Generally, it takes 6-7 kilowatts to desalinate one cubic meter (264.17 gallons).  Energy costs these days have seldom been higher; the cost of electricity has risen 13-18% a year in just the past eighteen months.

The second impediment has been disposal of the byproduct, brine. The residue contains sodium chloride (salt), magnesium, calcium, potassium, and even trace elements of lithium. The obvious answer is so what? Why not just put it back in the sea, from whence it came? The answer is that unless it is effectively dispersed, concentrated brine results in lower ocean oxygen leading to dead zones. It can be effectively disbursed to avoid this, but, that costs money (and more energy).

For some, the only option has been desalination. Islands without abundant freshwater sources for example. The Middle East accounts for 42% of all freshwater  desalination:  99% for Qatar, 90% for Kuwait and Bahrain, 86% for Oman, and 70% for Saudi Arabia. The Middle East has always had abundant energy and has never been a model of environmental consciousness. But, what about places that have stringent environmental controls on energy use and residue disposal? California has pivoted to innovative offshore technologies, inland brackish plants, and has a number of coastal traditional plants. Texas is another state that has a significant number of inland brackish water plants and has coastal plants on the horizon.

Still, the percentage of freshwater from desalination in the US is minimal, less than four percent.  Recent technological advances may change that. Energy costs and environmental impacts stand to be slashed by the new technologies.

China’s Beijing based Institute of Process Engineering at China’s Academy of Science at Shenzhen University is pioneering a new medium consisting of ultra-black nanomaterials embedded with organic polymers that absorb up to 90.2% of incoming sunlight to evaporate water with 47.5% less energy. The promise is of drinking water at lower cost than bottled water.

The University of Rochester is working on a new technology to make freshwater without brine by separating salts and other minerals as solids and even collecting rare lithium in the process.

California based OceanWell has launched a unique offshore desalination technology that mirrors the way traditional land based well fields collect water. By using the natural pressures of water at depth (for those of you who scuba dive, recall Boyles law: At sea level, one atmosphere of pressure surrounds you; for each ten meters of depth, an additional atmosphere is gained). Water under pressure tries to get into a series of pods that have membranes at openings that allow only freshwater to enter, filtering out all salts and minerals in a marine friendly way. It is deceptively simple: Natural pressure is traded for the traditionally energy intensive means of pumping water through a membrane. The result would be a 42% reduction in energy demand and desalination without brine disposal. A pilot Well Farm has been launched 4.5 miles off Malibu.

So, when you doom scroll through the negative news, know that it’s the loudest and dumbest that garners the media attention. There are some innovative folks out there quietly solving the big problems.

THAT LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL MIGHT BE A PROBLEM

“How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when it is clearly Ocean.” Arthur C. Clarke

2026 has already been one for the records. In the western US, the lowest snowpack on record in many sub-basins of the Colorado River. A week of 80˚ F days in March in Colorado’s high country left May and June with some of the lowest rivers in history. A withering snowpack that threatens to crash Lake Powell, the nation’s second largest man-made reservoir to a level that prevents hydroelectric generation (it sits today at 23.5% of capacity), while the largest of the reservoirs on the Colorado, Lake Mead, faces the same fate at just 35% of capacity. One consequence: Arizona faces up to 77% cut of its entitlements from the Colorado River.

The top ten hottest years of record for our Earth have occurred, you guessed it, in the last ten. A recent report from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts  (ECMWF) confirmed what the NOAA sea-buoys have reported. The Pacific surface temperatures in the El Niño Southern Oscillation zone that stretches from the central Pacific to the coast of central and South America are projected to rise 5.4˚ F above average by December. Some projections are 25% higher.

Photo Credit: NOAA Satellite Imagery

Water planners, farmers, ranchers, and wildfire responders in the western U.S. are seeing a light at the end of the tunnel with projections of a cooler and wetter late summer and fall. But too often, that light at the end of the tunnel turns out to be a train barreling toward you. The fear of many is that this El Niño will not bring meaningful relief but will be more akin to throwing lighter fluid on a world already on fire.

Bear with me if you heard this before from me. Heat is energy. The warmer the atmosphere, the more energy in the atmosphere. A super-charged atmosphere results in stronger storms and wilder swings between drought and storms. A strong El Niño is disruptive: The typical pattern is extreme drought in areas like the US Northwest, Australia, southern Africa, and Indonesia while other areas like the southern U.S., South America and North Africa face extreme precipitation events. Why? A significant part of that excess heat stored in the sea is released, raising the  temperature of the patient, and remember, the last ten years have been the hottest ten years on record for the Earth.

Buckle up.

CHARGING INTO THE FUTURE BLIND

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” Plato (c. 380 BC)

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has assigned an 80% chance of a strong El Niño event commencing in the late summer with a 96% chance that the El Niño will continue into early 2027. El Niños (warming phase) and La Niñas (cooling phase) are natural cycles that alternate roughly every 3-7 years. What makes this one special is the abnormally intense heating of the Pacific equatorial region.

A strong El Niño can disrupt weather patterns worldwide. Typically, the greatest effects are felt in equatorial nations in Central and South America, Africa, and Australia. The southern US states typically are wetter while the Northwest and Ohio Valley are drier and warmer. For the Rockies, that store snowpack and feed the major rivers in the country, it has always been a crapshoot. Sometimes the effects go just south of the state, other years the state is hit. The El Niño of 1982-1983 brought the “blizzard years” to Colorado in the winter of 1983-1984, leaving the state with record snowfall…over 400 inches in many places.

While such a winter is welcome to skiers, it can be deadly and costly to most locales and El Niño’s flipside, extreme drought in areas and record flooding in others, complicates an already stressed ecosystem. These effects translate to crop disruptions, heat stress, famine, and impacts on commodity costs that are already elevated due to Middle East energy disruption. The effects can be felt across the spectrum from commodity costs to insurance premiums.

Advance warning and prediction are a fundamental tool for preparedness and resiliency.

In the Atlantic, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC) is slowing. This is the ocean’s massive conveyor belt that brings warm salty water from the equator north to Iceland and Europe where it cools, sinks, and returns. It regulates weather, distributes nutrients for marine stocks, and absorbs carbon. Without the AMOC, scientists predict areas of Canada, North America and Europe could have temperatures fall as much as 18-50F degrees. A catastrophic potential, however small.

Seventy percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by oceans. The oceans’ actions and interactions are directly related to weather, climate, coastal zone flooding, extreme weather such as typhoons and hurricanes, and impacts to water and sewer infrastructure (40% of the US population lives in the coastal zone).  Having data, science, on what the ocean is doing is fundamental to anticipating, preventing, and coping with the effects of nature on our lives.

In the midst of needing to know more, not less, blindness sets in. The administration announced its intent to dismantle a critical deep ocean buoy monitoring network composed of 900 buoys that are a part of the Ocean Observatories Initiative that began full operations in 2016. The system cost over $370 million to install and was to have a lifespan of thirty years. The annual operation cost of the system is only $48 million. The cost to dismantle the relatively new system? More than its original $370 million cost.

The WMO and NOAA admit that removal of the buoys will reduce the accuracy of weather forecasting and drought preparedness.

Why, when the economics do not support any savings? Logic doesn’t play into the equation. It is cultural. To have data that might frame an issue one disagrees with is not a good reason to eliminate the data. America has always been a country of science, technology and an attitude that it can be better through education and solving the hard problems. Bright minds are to be celebrated not deterred. If we don’t, we risk fulfilling Bejamin Franklin’s famous saying: “We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.“

MEMORIAL DAY 2026

On this day in 1787 the Constitutional Convention commenced in Philadelphia. It would last nearly four months. George Washington, former general of the Continental Army, was elected to preside over an ambitious convention attended by delegates from the thirteen former colonies that had prevailed over the most powerful navy and army in the world. Their goal? To draft the Constitution. A document unlike any before establishing a nation to be governed by its citizens under the rule of law, not by a king or a ruler proclaiming edicts.

Since then, 656,000 Americans have given their lives to preserve and defend the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and the rule of law. That is why we honor the solemn day of Memorial Day.

Those 656,000 had dreams, plans, aspirations for their lives. They left behind countless shattered lives. Moments of silence, flowers on graves, flags flying, family barbeques are all simple ways to remember, give tribute, but the true means by which they should be honored is to believe in what they died for. Freedom, the sanctity of the rule of law, and the Constitution.

Those ideals are stronger than allegiances to temporal partisan politics. They are convictions that cannot be squared with compensation to convicted felons that sought to overturn democracy, breach the capitol, and assault police. Those felons were convicted by a jury of their peers under the law after the presentment of evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, not simply by some wrongful prosecutor. That’s the rule of law, not lawfare.  History cannot be rewritten; it can only be learned from.

Today is a day for every American to focus back on what Memorial Day is, why the defense of democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution matter, and why those that gave their lives to protect and enshrine these principles should be honored. It’s more than flying a flag and a barbeque…although I’ll do both today.

OUR ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT WATER ARE OFF, BY A LOT

“Assumptions are made and most assumptions are wrong”. Albert Einstein

The study of water resources merges three sciences: Weather, Climate, and Hydrology. The first two, weather and climate are vastly different concepts that many misconstrue as the same thing. Weather is a short-term snapshot of the local atmosphere, which can vary greatly from hour to hour, day to day. Climate is a predictable average of the long term weather conditions usually collected and averaged over decades of actual observance.

When people make comments like “there is no climate change or global warming, just look at the record winter we had last year” they make the mistake of thinking weather and climate are synonyms…which brings me to another Albert Einstein quote: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former”.

This past winter saw a rather chaotic weather pattern. The Northeast was hammered by brutal back to back winter storms, while the Rockies and the Southwest had little to no snow and warm temperatures that had never been seen (in March, high elevations in the Rockies saw a week of 80 degree days while Phoenix experienced multiple hundred degree days). These events are weather, not climate.

What both have in common is energy.

A warming climate means a warmer atmosphere. As the atmosphere warms, the level of  energy in the atmosphere elevates. Evaporation from moisture and water on the Earth’s surface increases. And this transfer of moisture from the earth to the atmosphere isn’t limited to warm seasons. The colder it is, water vapor is sublimated into the atmosphere from snow.  Uneven warming creates temperature and pressure variations, which in turn, moves air from high to low pressure; the result is wind.

What goes up must come down. That atmospheric moisture rises, cools and comes down as rain or snow. The more moisture, the more storms. The more heat, the more energy, the greater storm events.

Water resource planning for ranchers, municipalities, recreation, and industry is predicated on climate assumptions. We know there are wet and dry years, warm and cold years, it’s natural. These are known assumptions and water planners take into account how often (on average) each occur and how extreme they have been in the past. These assumptions then serve as a template from which future water supplies are predicated.

Enter the era of climate change. This period commenced with the industrial revolution but really came to a head as the earth’s population swelled resulting in acceleration of the effects of greenhouse gases. Population is the multiplier as every new soul wants electricity, food, transportation…things. The chart below tells the story:

US POPULATION WORLD POPULATION

1850 23 million 1.26 billion

1900 75 million 1.66 billion

1990 249 million 5.30 billion

2026 345 million 8.30 billion

  Match the population trend against the global temperature rise:

It’s hard (impossible) to empirically assert that anthropogenic (human caused) climate change isn’t fact.

In the western United States, record keeping of weather events and water levels first began in the late 1880s. Things were fairly static until 1990. Droughts were measured once in every ten or twenty years. In America, since 2000 the West has seen 19 years of drought out of the last 25 years. Most of those years broke all records. Tree ring analysis shows the last 25 years have been the driest in the last 1200 years. When you look at the last three decades, those trends and averages constitute climate.

So now we have seen over three decades of empirical evidence as to climate. It should then come as no surprise that hydrologic assumptions generated before the last thirty years are wrong. Dead wrong. Yet, those are the assumptions that have underpinned water law, the relationship of the states on the Colorado River (Law of the River), and water planning. Bad assumptions lead to bad results.

In 2011, I presented a paper at the XIV World Water Congress in Brazil entitled “Compelling Adaptive Water Management to Meet the Challenges of Climate Change”. I think about ten people read it. It identified the need to not rely on historical assumptions in planning for the future. For engineers, such talk is blasphemy.

We will have to adapt to a changing climate if we are to address the challenges of a changing world. Finance, medicine, technology, most disciplines do. For some reason, lawyers and engineers have problems escaping the past. Sometimes it takes a near biblical drought to jar ideas.

THE WEST’S NEW WATER PARADIGM

The driest 25 years in the last 1200 years have occurred in the West since 2000. And it’s only 2026. The Rockies are the spine of the nation. Rain falling on the east side of the Rockies’ continental divide flow to the Atlantic. Rain falling on the west side flows to the Pacific.

The  Southwest produces over half of the nation’s vegetables, nuts, and fruits. The crops rely on irrigation withdrawn from the major river systems fed by the natural cycle of winter snow slowly melting off from spring to fall, cresting in a peak known as the runoff period. That peak has always occurred in a narrow window between mid-May and mid-June, year after year. It’s a constant water managers, farmers, ranchers, and recreational interests have developed their planning on. Until now.

In the Southwest and Rockies, 2026 is defining a new future. Sure, there have been heavy winters and droughts, but nothing quite like this. With a dismal to non-existent snowpack and a March that was bone-dry with 80˚F temperatures in the high elevations, there will be no runoff period this year. Streamflows are at record lows and reservoirs will not fill.

Some farmers are choosing to reduce plantings, ranchers are selling off cattle, and cities are scrambling to shore up water supplies.

Water planners have always used dry years of record to develop water supply planning, 1954, 1977, 2018, 2022; they were all dry years. Now the paradigm has changed, the dry year has become the norm. What does this do? Solutions cost money: Additional storage, conjunctive water use, and acquisitions of senior water rights mean higher utility bills. On the grocery side: Less crops planted and less livestock mean higher grocery bills. It all drives up the cost of living.

I’ve written before that a rise in atmospheric heat equates to more energy in the atmosphere (heat = energy). The more energy, the higher the volatility is. Stronger storms, more powerful droughts.

Perhaps one indicator of how much of a nerd I am is I follow ocean buoys. Sexy, huh? Sea surface temperatures foretell future downrange short-term climate. NOAA maintains both surface and deep ocean monitoring buoys at different depths. The TAO/TRITON Array (Tropical Atmospheric Ocean)(Triangle Trans-Ocean Buoy Network) was first commenced in 1985 and completed in 1994. Since then, it has been the best source of data for observing and predicting El Niño and La Niña climate phenomena.

La Niña is associated with a cooling phase while El Niño reflects a warming phase. These are natural cycles occurring every two-seven years. What is less natural is transitioning from an El Niño to a super El Niño. That is apparently what the Pacific is now registering with surface water temperatures rising 3.6˚F in a single year.

El Niño will affect the entire country. Typically, a strong El Niño means a warmer and drier Northwest, a rainier and more humid Northeast, a cooler and rainier Southeast and more precipitation in the Southwest. For Colorado it is always a crapshoot as the state seems to be a dividing line where historically the pattern swings above or below the state.

What is apparent is that the strength and volatility of climactic vents are more dramatic and occurring more frequently as the atmosphere absorbs more energy occasioned by a warming climate. That makes water planning more difficult and agriculture more difficult.

The new paradigm to adapt and plan for a changing hydrograph will make utilities and groceries cost more. So, when someone presents an argument that tacking climate change solutions is too costly, factor in the costs of not addressing the underlying events.

A PERFECT STORM FOR FARMERS & RURAL AMERICA

"The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways." — John F. Kennedy

American farmers and ranchers have a tough time in good years. 2025-2026 have set the stage for making their life far worse, and by extension all of our lives a bit harder. I can’t recall another time when there have been so many barriers to the success of the American farmer and rancher:

1.    Budget Cuts: Since January 2025, the Department of Agriculture has been gutted, both in workforce (24% job cuts) and dramatic cuts to grant funding and low interest loans that farmers and ranchers rely on, such as NRCS funding;

 2.    Tariffs and Trade Wars: Tariffs drove up equipment and material costs, and slashed the number of buyers for crops (like China and Canada);

 3.    Immigration Policies: Farm labor has taken a hit;

 4.    War: The Iran war has driven up the cost of inputs such as diesel, fertilizer and even seed (some peg the war’s impact to fertilizer cost at nearly 400%); and

 5.    Drought: Almost 2/3 of the lower 48 states are now in drought. The Southwest and Southeast are particularly impacted. The entire state of Colorado is in drought with a majority being in extreme or exceptional drought.

One can’t exaggerate how significant the current year drought is in the Southwest. The Colorado, Green, Platte, Arkansas, and Rio Grande Rivers originate in Colorado. These rivers flow through 19 states (and two feed the Mississippi). As snowpack dwindles, so do the rivers.

 As the chart shows below, Colorado’ water availability is literally in unchartered territory (the black line is where we are; the green line is where we would be in an average year; and the redline is the lowest of record until this year):

While four out of five of these roadblocks are self-inflicted wounds, all five impediments are coming together to challenge the most honorable of professions: Farming and ranching.

Not much can be done about the impact of drought in the short term. One thing is clear, with the rise in global temperature, the atmosphere holds an exponentially greater amount of energy and that energy translates to stronger storms and more severe droughts. It’s volatility. As my Substack last week noted, 75% of registered voters view climate change as real and want steps taken to lessen the impacts.

The questions in the short term are can the American farmer and rancher hang on and how can they be supported? Better policy and eliminating trade barriers that interfere with the free market would be a start.

We are all in the boat with the rancher and farmer. Unlike any other profession, every American relies on the success of the farmer and rancher to keep the dinner table filled and groceries affordable. No one can afford another farm crisis like the 1930s and 1980s. We should all take steps to ensure that doesn’t occur.

THE EXTINCTION OF ENVIRONMENTAL DENIALISM

“Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” Mark Twain, 1897 (some believe Charles Dudley Warner first coined the satirical phrase).

Unless you’ve been on another continent for the last five months, you know this winter and spring have been one for the books. The Northeast and a small slice of California’s Sierras were the only places where winter seemed like winter.

A majority of states are now in moderate to exceptional drought. NOAA’s Palmer Drought Severity Index rose to its highest March level since 1895, when record keeping began, and March was the third highest index of any month behind the dustbowl months of July and August of 1934.

Couple these extremes with a little known concept of Vapor Pressure Deficit (VPD) and it’s downright scary. VPD is the difference between the amount of moisture the air can hold and the amount that is in the air. Think of a vacuum. As the deficit grows, the vacuum increases sucking moisture from soil and vegetation. In March, the VPN was 77% above normal.

The environment and drought have real world implications for everyone: Higher food costs, wildfire, and shortages in drinking water.

Since 2000, Colorado, which births the majority of the West’s rivers, has seen 19 dry years, five being the worst in record keeping. Tree ring studies confirm these 25 years have been the driest in the last 1200 years.

This week, the Bureau of Reclamation announced it was releasing between 660,000 and 1,000,000 acre feet from Wyoming’s Flaming Gorge Reservoir and reducing releases from Lake Powell by 1.48 million acre feet in an effort to keep Powell from dropping below the power pool level, where its turbines can no longer generate electricity. Most believe that is a stopgap, the level will still be reached. And some in Arizona and Nevada are furious.

March saw 80-degree weather in Colorado’s high Rockies. Unheard of. Stream flows are at record lows and it’s getting to be the time of year when rivers should be nearing their maximums.

A Gallup poll conducted this month showed that 44% of all Americans are worried about the environment and 66% believe the environment is declining and want the government to do more to prevent it. It’s an election year so let’s talk about the other 34%.

Democrats and Republicans are both minorities. In 2025, 45-46% of all registered voters nationwide were registered independents. The remaining 54% are split equally between Democrats and Republicans at roughly 27% each.

While partisan media and social media drive shrill theories and false narratives on both sides, the important story is that 38% of Republicans believe the climate and environment are worsening and want action. The poll also showed 66% of independents and 84% of registered Democrats believed the same thing. All these numbers mean one thing: 75% of registered voters believe the environment is worsening, climate change is real, and we need to do more. That is an astounding statistic on any issue in an election year.

As we are just beginning the spring and summer, when droughts historically worsen, I wonder what the polls will say in the fall?

CHEAP WATER

The national average for a single family home’s electric bill is $140-$150/month. In some locale’s the bill can be over $600/month. Contrast that to a national average water utility bill of $40-$50/month (some locations can exceed $110/month). These are averages for a normal sized home with modest lawn. Larger homes, larger lawns, are more. Why the disparity?

The difference can be traced to three factors: 1) Nearly all water suppliers are governmental which seeks to provide water to its citizenry at the lowest price without profit; 2) water utilities are inherently local with each provider having a different mix of supply and quality contrasted against power generation that has more uniformity in costs; and 3) electrical generation is more influenced by the national and international costs of natural resources used to generate electricity (i.e., market set coal, gas prices).

In short, we have always had cheap water. That’s changing. The reason, of course, comes down to supply and demand.

First, demand. As the nation moves away from fossil fuels, the nation becomes more electrically dependent (heating, cooking, cars transitioning to electric). Add to that the surging demands from data centers and an increasing digital/AI society, and you have the demand side. The reason? With the exception of renewable energy (hydro, solar, wind), all power generation consumes significant quantities of freshwater in order to cool nuclear reactors or generate steam by burning natural gas and coal. While some regions face population increases, just as many confront decreases. The US population is growing at a slow pace, only about 0.5%/year.

The supply side is the gamechanger. The twentieth century was the age of federal water projects. The west was transformed by massive dam, pipeline, irrigation, and hydropower development funded by Congressional appropriations. In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, funding has been constrained limited largely to maintaining and replacing aging infrastructure. The result is that local water providers have had to internalize more costs in their rate structure.  

Add to that the fact that pretty much all the “easy,” “cheap” water supplies have been developed. The supplies that exist going forward are costly requiring greater expenses for transfers, treatment, all of which are compounded by inflation. Let’s take a few examples:

·         In Southwestern Utah, the Pine Valley Water Supply Project is currently in planning and review for the construction of a seventy-mile pipeline. Estimated cost: Nearly $300 million to develop and transport 15,000 acre feet of water per year ($20,000/af);

·         Queen Creek, Arizona and Buckeye, Arizona recently acquired groundwater from the distant Harquahala basin. The supply is anticipated to last a hundred years. Estimated cost: $13,441/af.

·         Corps Christi, Texas just put on hold the Inner Harbor Seawater Desalination Plant with an estimated cost of $980 million to $1.2 billion. The project would, if pursued, supply 30 million gallons/day (92.07 acre feet/day or $33,600 af/year). Net cost: $29,762/af)

·         Denver’s Gross Dam expansion is estimated to come in at as much as $819 million to add 77,000 acre feet of storage, less 5,000 acre feet for environmental mitigation. Net cost: $11,375/af

Federal projects constructed in the mid-to-late twentieth century resulted in a water cost between $150/af to $1,200/af. Some projects sold water at costs of as little as $7.20/af. That’s a far cry from $20,000/af.

In most locations in the U.S. there is no “commodity cost” of water taken from a stream. The cost to the utility is collecting, transporting, treating and distributing water. However, in the arid western U.S., where the prior appropriation doctrine prioritizes water by the date the water was first spoken for, water rights (the right to take water from a stream or aquifer, has a commodity cost.

We can expect to see water bills rise. Not to the level of electrical bills, but narrowing the disparity. Some decry water is a public good and should not be monetized. While that argument has a tinge of merit, it ignores reality. The simple fact is that even for non-profit governmental utilities, rates are a function of the costs of developing, transporting, treating, storing, and distributing this increasingly scarce resource.

Wise water planning can buffer costs to existing consumers by saddling the costs of new raw water sources and expanded infrastructure largely on new demands (making growth pay its own way), but that has its limits as new expansions are more often than not also undertaken to replace ageing infrastructure and meeting new water quality standards that benefit existing customers. The effect can be buffered, but not eliminated.

We all are going to have to acknowledge that the age of cheap freshwater is over.