California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Water Supply Strategy

 At first glance, Gov. Gavin Newsom's new water strategy may suggest that the project he's proposing will generate about 7 million acre-feet of new water, but a closer look shows that's not entirely true. Newsom's water strategy will add about half when each proposed storage unit is built and the proposed water recycling and desalination project is completed. Still, his plans are timely and much needed, but implementing them will require unprecedented compromise from California's powerful environmental lobby. Tanks are never completely emptied and are rarely full, especially in the case of waste water tanks. In the case of cellars, aquifers can be slowly replenished in rural areas by large expanding flood catchment basins or in urban areas by ponds. This means that water can only be extracted at a rate that can be pumped.

Therefore, these storage projects could add about 1.5 million acre-feet of new water per year rather than 4 million acre-feet. Newsom's plan is to complete a voter-approved conservation project in 2014. A major part of the project, a reservoir for the proposed Colusa County site, has withstood constant attacks from environmentalists. To compromise with them, the design was reduced from 2 million acre feet to 1.5 million acre feet.

The resistance to the site is unique. Environmentalists have consistently opposed new reservoirs in California, even those that do not interfere with the natural flow of rivers and the expansion of existing ones. They stopped many offers. It also blocked construction of a large-scale desalination plant in Southern California earlier this year.

Newsom noted this and lamented that environmental regulations have not built as many bad projects as good ones. “The timing of this dam project is ridiculous. Permits last for several years. One of the tenets of this plan is to break through the regulatory thicket, change the permits, accelerate these projects and move forward.

But can he make it possible?

Other key elements of Newsom's plan include:

Increasing municipal wastewater reuse is a relatively uncontroversial idea that could add a significant 1.8 million acre-feet of water to California's annual water supply.
Save another 500,000 acres by getting city residents to plant lawns, fix leaks, and shorten showers.
Doubling desalinated seawater and brackish groundwater by adding 84,000 acre-feet of capacity per year. But despite large-scale desalination work underway around the world, desalination adds no more than a fraction of California's water needs, as environmentalists contend.
Newsom's call for Californians to abandon the deficit mentality is a new message. If all these projects can go ahead, this is a great achievement.

According to the California Department of Water Resources, total conversions to support cities, farms and ecosystems have been 75 million acre-feet per year over the past decade. These fluctuations cannot continue without this level of fresh water, as worsening droughts threaten all major resources: groundwater, Colorado River water, and water stored in reservoirs.

"Most of the water conversation in this state has been about conservation and scarcity thinking," Newsom said in announcing the plan in August. 11. “This is a relatively small part of the overall strategy we are implementing today. Now we will focus on producing more water.”

A big part of Newsom's strategy is capture. He proposed "extending the grounds and cellars." This is equivalent to 4 million of the target of 7 million acre-feet, but this figure is misleading because it refers to storage capacity, not annual production. The "production" of reservoirs and aquifers is at most one third of their capacity.

 

Read more: https://calmatters.org/commentary/2022/09/for-his-water-plan-to-work-newsom-must-marshal-all-key-forces/