Day: November 7, 2018

As Deadline Looms, @Arizona Cancels Another @Drought Planning Meeting — The Phoenix New Times #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Verde River near Clarkdale along Sycamore Canyon Road. Photo credit: Wikimedia

From The Phoenix New Times (Elizabeth Whitman):

A major public meeting in Arizona that was scheduled for Thursday to discuss plans to deal with a potential drought on the Colorado River has been canceled. Again.

For the second time in two weeks, the 38-member steering committee for Arizona’s Drought Contingency Plan needs more time to negotiate and will not meet as planned, the Arizona Department of Water Resources and the Central Arizona Project said in two announcements on Monday and Tuesday.

Sally Lee, spokesperson for the ADWR, said that steering committee members were notified at around 2 p.m. on Monday and on Tuesday. Last month’s canceled October 25 meeting was called off with even less notice — less than 48 hours’ worth.

Initially, organizers said Thursday’s steering committee meeting would be replaced with a private workgroup meeting to discuss mitigation. But by Tuesday, that private meeting had been canceled too, per steering committee co-chairs Tom Buschatzke, director of the ADWR, and Ted Cooke, general manager of CAP…

“Stakeholders participating in mitigation discussions have indicated that there are still major areas of conceptual disagreement that are not likely to be reconciled” before Thursday, the cancellation notice on the Central Arizona Project’s website read on Tuesday…

By the end of November, the committee is supposed to negotiate how potential water cuts would be distributed among the Arizona’s water users, if Lake Mead enters into an official drought in 2020. Arizona’s own negotiations are part of a broader effort by seven states to deal with the potential drought on the Colorado River.

The odds of this are about 50/50, according the federal Bureau of Reclamation. A Tier 1 drought shortage is declared if the Lake Mead reservoir’s levels drop below 1,075 feet above sea level. At 5 p.m. on November 6, its levels stood just above 1,078 feet. Lake Mead supplies Arizona with 40 percent of its water.

Heather Macre, a board member of the Central Arizona Project who does not sit on the steering committee but is familiar with the negotiations, said that everyone was concerned about making the November deadline. But she also suggested it was somewhat flexible, because Arizona needs to get legislative approval for its plan, and the legislative session doesn’t begin until January.

“Even if we have it mostly done by November and we’re still tweaking in December, we can get it to the Legislature in January,” Macre said. No one really wanted to do that, she added.

“I don’t want to push the deadline any more than anyone else does,” she said. “I think we can get it done by the end of the month. And if we don’t, we still do have a little bit of time.”

Ballot measures taking aim at #climatechange fall short — The Washington Post

Karley Robinson with newborn son Quill on their back proch in Windsor, CO. A multi-well oil and gas site sits less than 100 feet from their back door, with holding tanks and combustor towers that burn off excess gases. Quill was born 4 weeks premature. Pictured here at 6 weeks old.

From The Washington Post ( Brady Dennis and Dino Grandoni):

Initiatives in Arizona, Colorado and Washington that would have propped up renewable energy and tamped down on fossil fuels failed to garner enough votes.

Voters in Arizona, one of the nation’s most sun-soaked states, shot down a measure that would have accelerated its shift toward generating electricity from sunlight. Residents in oil- and gas-rich Colorado defeated a measure to sharply limit drilling on state-owned land.

Even in the solidly blue state of Washington, initial results were poor for perhaps the most consequential climate-related ballot measure in the country this fall: A statewide initiative that would have imposed a first-in-the-nation fee on emissions of carbon dioxide, the most prevalent of the greenhouse gases that drive global warming.

The failure of the ballot measures underscores the difficulty of tackling a global problem like climate change policy at the local level, even as environmental advocates and lawmakers have turned to state governments to counter the Trump administration’s rollback of Obama-era efforts to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions and as scientists warn the world has only a bit more than a decade to keep global warming to moderate levels…

But elsewhere on the ballot in Colorado, environmental advocates failed to pass a measure known as Proposition 112. The initiative would have required new wells to be at least 2,500 feet from occupied buildings and other “vulnerable areas” such as parks and irrigation canals — a distance several times that of existing regulations. It also allows local governments to require even longer setbacks.

As oil production has soared in Colorado in recent years and the population has grown, more and more residents are living near oil and gas facilities. Those who supported the ballot measure argued it was necessary to reduce potential health risks and the noise and other nuisances of living near drilling sites. Opponents countered that the proposal would virtually eliminate new oil and gas drilling on non-federal land in the state — they have derided it as an “anti-fracking” push — and claimed it would cost jobs and deprive local governments of tax revenue.

The industry-backed group, Protect Colorado, raised roughly $38 million this year as it opposed the controversial measure, which it says would “wipe out thousands of jobs and devastate Colorado’s economy for years to come.” By contrast, the main group backing the proposal, known as Colorado Rising for Health and Safety, raised about $1 million…

Meanwhile in the state of Washington, the effort to put a price on carbon emissions is on the verge of defeat, with 56.3 percent of voters rejecting the measure and 43.7 percent supporting it as of Tuesday evening, when two-thirds of the votes were counted. An official at the Washington secretary of state’s office said Monday the vote-by-mail system in the state means it could take several days for a final vote tally.

With the measure known as Initiative 1631, Washington would become the first state in the nation to tax carbon dioxide — an approach many scientists, environmental advocates and policymakers argue will be essential on a broad scale to nudge the world away from its reliance on fossil fuels and to combat climate change.

But that proposal, like other environmental initiatives across the country, had come with a fight, pitting big oil refiners against a collection of advocates that includes unions, Native American groups, business leaders like Bill Gates and former New York City mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, as well as the state’s Democratic governor, Jay Inslee…

Florida voters, likely with the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill still fresh in mind, decided to amend the state constitution to ban offshore oil and gas in state waters.

That decision served as another blow to efforts by the Trump administration and the oil industry to expand offshore drilling nationwide. While Trump’s Interior Department initially suggested allowing drilling across 90 percent of the outer continental shelf, oil lobbyists eyed the section of the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida as one of the biggest prizes.

Floating #Solar Is Best Solution For Walden’s High Electric Bills — CleanTechnica.com #ActOnClimate

From CleanTechnica.com (Charles W. Thurston):

When a town has high electric bills and no available land for a solar farm, a floating solar plant on the pond of a waste water plant makes great sense. Walden, Colorado, population 750, elevation 8,000 feet plus, and land area of 0.34 square miles, is such a town.

Photo credit: CleanTechnica.com

“We were spending about $22,000 a month for electricity for the water treatment facility, and this 75 kW solar installation will save us $10,000 a month,” says Jim Dustin, mayor of Walden, Colo. “We’ll pay for the plant in 20 years, and it is still expected to run 10 more years after that,” he says.

The plant technology was furnished by floating solar specialists Ciel & Terre USA and was installed by GRID Specialists. The $400,000 cost of the plant was offset by a $200,000 grant from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs, which manages revenues earned by oil and gas development tax in the state. The project also was supported by the Colorado Energy Office.

“The Energy Office is interested in this installation because it gets down to minus 40 or 50 degrees in the winter, and we have very high winds. They want to know if the technology will work, because there are irrigation ponds and unused water bodies all over this state,” says Dustin. The energy office has offered $120,000 to move the installation to another location if it doesn’t work in Walden, he adds.

The Energy Office is also interested in conserving water in the state, where evaporation reduces holding pond levels by up to 90 inches per year, according to Taylor Lewis, a program engineer at the agency. “We have 2,000 man-made reservoirs in the state to keep water so if we can identify a few where it makes sense to cover them with solar, there could be a double benefit of water savings and electricity generation,” he says.

The concept of covering drinking water bodies to reduce evaporation is not new. “I’ve been looking at claims by the City of Los Angeles that they have saved billions of gallons of water over the past 10 years at four reservoirs, using black floating plastic balls,” Lewis says. “We’re interested in studying the impact with floating solar here,” he adds.

Johnson Controls came up with the initial idea of a floating solar array for Walden, says Dustin. “The floating solar array is a milestone for the Town of Walden and highlights the potential for Colorado’s overall energy efforts,” said Rowena Adams, a Performance Infrastructure account executive at Johnson Controls, in a statement.

“It was a practical choice for Walden given the surrounding bodies of water and the town’s energy resiliency efforts at the Town Water Treatment Facility, as well as the desire to conserve water and minimize algae growth,” Adams said.

Ciel & Terre, the technology provider, has more water projects in mind for Colorado. “With demand for solar power continuing to rise and available real estate becoming more expensive, floating solar is the ideal solution for anyone with a manmade pond or body of water. It’s cost-effective, quick to install, easy to maintain, and offers a variety of environmental benefits,” said Eva Pauly-Bowles, the representative director for the US office of the French company.

“Floating solar is no longer an exotic niche in the US, but a rapidly growing sector of the solar market. Ciel & Terre USA has other larger floating solar projects under construction and planned across the country,” Papuly-Bowles said.

Deploying a floating solar array on manmade bodies of water improves energy production by keeping the solar system cooler, Ciel & Terre says. At the same time it reduces evaporation, controls algae growth, and reduces water movement to minimize bank erosion, it says. Floating solar arrays also make optimal use of pond surfaces, providing clean solar energy without committing expensive real estate or requiring rooftop installations, the company adds.

Established in 2006 as a renewable Independent Power Producer (IPP), Ciel & Terre has been fully devoted to floating solar PV since 2011. The French company pioneered Hydrelio, the first specific and industrialized system to make solar panels float on water, with criteria such as cost-effectiveness, safety, longevity, resistance to winds and waves, simplicity, drinking water compliance, and optimized electrical yield, the company states in its profile.

Ciel & Terre has floating solar installations in Japan, Korea, China, UK, France, Brazil, Singapore, Malaysia, Italy, and Taiwan as well as the United States. The company has its United States headquarters in Petaluma, California.