Day: February 27, 2024

@UteWater Board of Directors commits financial backing to keep Shoshone water rights flowing west in perpetuity #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Click the link to read the release on the Ute Water website:

February 24, 2024

With a unanimous decision during a regular board meeting on February 14th, Ute Water’s Board of Directors pledged a financial contribution of two million dollars to the Colorado River District in securing the Shoshone water rights. The largest domestic water provider between Denver, Colorado, and Salt Lake City, Utah, is committing funding for the historic and monumental acquisition of the state’s largest and most senior non-consumptive water right on the Colorado River. This landmark purchase aims to finalize the Shoshone permanence efforts that Ute Water has been committed to for over 20 years.

Summary: View of a packtrain used for President Theodore Roosevelt’s hunting party in Glenwood Canyon (Garfield County), Colorado. The Colorado River is nearby.. Date: 1905. Buckwalter, Harry H.. Photo credit: Denver Public Library Digital Collections

What are the Shoshone water rights?

The senior Shoshone water right was established in 1902, before the Shoshone Hydroelectric Facility was constructed in the Glenwood Canyon east of Glenwood Springs, Colorado. The rights have commanded supreme control over the Colorado River for over a century to ensure the hydroelectric plant’s “first in time, first in right” allocation to run water through the power-generating turbines and back into the river below. The Colorado River water that exits the Xcel Energy-owned facility after power generation flows downstream has contributed to the life force of the Grand Valley for generations.

On December 19th, 2023, Xcel Energy signed a momentous Purchase Sale Agreement (PSA) with the Colorado River District, which will transfer the senior water rights to the multi-county conservation organization for 98.5 million dollars. The sale will provide a permanent solution to an agreement made in 2016–the Shoshone Outage Protocol (SHOP), a standing acknowledgment between major water users across the state to operate the Shoshone Call, thereby sending historic flows westerly even when the hydroelectric facility is not in operation. The facility does not have any plans to close to date, but isolated outages related to the age of infrastructure and a host of natural disasters that the Glenwood Canyon has inflicted, from rockslides to wildfires, have tested the SHOP agreement.

According to the Colorado Division of Water Resources, water rights can be abandoned or dissolved when not put to beneficial use. When called, rights as influential as Shoshone can command as much as 86,000 acre-feet of westerly flow in a dry year.

With the Shoshone water rights purchase, the Colorado River District, in collaboration with the Colorado Water Conservation Board, aim to arrange an instream flow agreement to secure the historic flows to the Western Slope.

Photo: 1950 “Public Service Dam” (Shoshone Dam) in Colorado River near Glenwood Springs Colorado.

Why are the Shoshone Water Rights important to Ute Water and its 90,000 customers?

With strategically redundant infrastructure and source waters, Ute Water can overcome the difficulties of dry years by activating secondary water sources from Ruedi Reservoir and the Colorado River to supplement primary Plateau Creek water sources. Additional flows in the Colorado River from the Shoshone call improve water quality characteristics, such as the dilution of salinity levels. Irrigation entities also rely on Colorado River flows that fill canals and allow for robust and bountiful agriculture. Continued flows from Shoshone aid in maintaining the natural heritage of four endangered and threatened fish species that utilize the 15-mile reach (Bonytail, Colorado Pikeminnow, Humpback Chub, and Razorback Sucker), and persist alongside continued water security and sustainability for the Grand Valley community.

On a statewide level, maintaining higher recreational flows fuels the river recreation economy in Colorado, where the Colorado River basin on the Western Slope contributes around four billion dollars annually to the state’s GDP, according to the Colorado River District. The flows from Shoshone that reach Lake Powell also contribute to Colorado River interstate compact compliance.

How will the purchase be funded?

The Colorado River District presented the plan and progress for funding the Shoshone permanency effort during Ute Water’s regular board meeting on February 14th. Colorado River District General Manager Andy Mueller outlined two major milestones that have gotten the project’s funding off the ground.

On December 19th, 2023, in conjunction with signing the PSA with Xcel Energy, the Colorado River District’s 15-county board unanimously approved a 20-million-dollar contribution.

Then on January 29th, during the regular Colorado Water Conservation Board meeting, a hearing took place regarding Shoshone water rights funding. Ute Water staff testified in support of the Shoshone permanency effort at the hearing, and the Colorado Water Conservation Board unanimously backed the effort with an additional 20 million dollars in state funds through the Non-Reimbursable Investment Grant.

Moving forward, the Colorado River District hopes to leverage at least ten million dollars committed by various water users and providers of the Western Slope who will continue to benefit from the flows of Shoshone. Once local funds are secured alongside Ute Water’s two-million-dollar contribution, the Colorado River District plans to request the remaining balance of 49 million dollars from the Bureau of Reclamation’s Inflation Reduction Act funding sources, which is slated to support drought mitigation funding projects like these efforts on Shoshone permanency.

What’s next?

More information about the effort can be found through the Shoshone Water Right Preservation Coalition and Campaign, of which Ute Water is a member, at keepshoshoneflowing.org. The Colorado River District plans to meet the four closing conditions of the PSA by December 31st, 2027. These closing conditions are as follows:

  1. Negotiation of an instream flow agreement with the Colorado Water Conservation Board
  2. A change of water rights decree through the water court process
  3. Secure Funding
  4. Approval by the Colorado Public Utilities Commission

Once these conditions are met and the acquisition is completed, Ute Water, the Grand Valley, and the Western Slope at large will realize the water security and sustainability benefits of Shoshone permanency.

Ute Water is proud to stand with our Western Slope community in preserving the lifeblood of our region – the Colorado River. Shoshone permanency has been generations in the making, and it will provide Western Slope water resources and prosperity for generations to come.

The latest on Keep Shoshone Flowing can be found online, on Facebook, and via newsletter.

More Coyote Gulch Shoshone coverage.

Research Article: Increasing prevalence of hot drought across western North America since the 16th century — Science Advances

Fig. 1. Subregional expression of reconstructed temperatures across WNA since 1553 CE. (Left) First four varimax-rotated eOF factor scores (ranging from −1.0 to +1.0) are mapped and labeled with the variance explained by each factor. (Right) Annual (thin black line) and 10-year low pass–filtered (thick red lines) reconstruction time series of JJA maximum temperatures for four major regions of WnA, spanning the period 1553 to 2020 ce. Anomalies are relative to the 1951 to 1980 ce mean. the four regional time series are calculated using the rotated varimax factor loadings over the period 1901 to 2000 ce. Credit: Science Advances

Click the link to access the article on the Science Advances website (Karen E. King, Edward R. Cook, Kevin J. Anchukaitis, Benjamin I. Cook, Jason E. Smerdon, Richard Seager, Grant L. Harley, and Benjamin Spei). Here’s the abstract:

Across western North America (WNA), 20th-21st century anthropogenic warming has increased the prevalence and severity of concurrent drought and heat events, also termed hot droughts. However, the lack of independent spatial reconstructions of both soil moisture and temperature limits the potential to identify these events in the past and to place them in a long-term context. We develop the Western North American Temperature Atlas (WNATA), a data-independent 0.5° gridded reconstruction of summer maximum temperatures back to the 16th century. Our evaluation of the WNATA with existing hydroclimate reconstructions reveals an increasing association between maximum temperature and drought severity in recent decades, relative to the past five centuries. The synthesis of these paleo-reconstructions indicates that the amplification of the modern WNA megadrought by increased temperatures and the frequency and spatial extent of compound hot and dry conditions in the 21st century are likely unprecedented since at least the 16th century.

A long-sought deal around a little power plant might be a model for #ColoradoRiver cooperation: Purchase of Shoshone Power Plant water rights in Glenwood Canyon will ensure baseline level — The #Denver Post #COriver #aridification

This historical photo shows the penstocks of the Shoshone power plant above the Colorado River. A coalition led by the Colorado River District is seeking to purchase the water rights associated with the plant. Credit: Library of Congress photo

Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:

February 26, 2024

A small hydroelectric power plant on the banks of the Colorado River has inspired a unique coalition in a state where water scarcity and politics often pit environmentalists, growers and recreationists against each other. Yet those groups recently set aside their competing interests in western Colorado, banding together to safeguard the water rights tied to the squat brown building tucked just off Interstate 70 in Glenwood Canyon. It still generates power, but its true value has been in the water that flows through it — which just might be the key to the river’s future…

Peter Fleming, the general counsel for the district, said of the interests along the river, from agricultural producers to the recreation industry: “Uniformly, across the board, they are in support of protecting the Shoshone flows. It’s pretty unique. People don’t always see eye to eye on water issues.”

[…]

Environmental protection plans exist based on the assumption that the water will be in the river. If the plant’s right were to disappear, those plans likely would need to be rewritten. The flows also keep water temperatures down for endangered fish and keep salinity low in drinking water for towns on the river…For agricultural producers in the Grand Valley, the water is crucial for growing Palisade peaches, wine grapes, wheat, corn, hay and alfalfa, said Tina Bergonzini, the general manager of the Grand Valley Water Users Association…The consistent flows provided by the Shoshone right also are critical for the $4 billion recreation industry centered on the Colorado River on the Western Slope, according to the river district.

More Coyote Gulch coverage of the Shoshone right.

Area #snowpack levels remain slightly below average for this time of year, with West Slope stations in Northern Water’s service area at a collective 95 percent of median and East Slope stations at 88 percent of median — @Northern_Water