Click the link to read the post on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
December 21. 2024
I was talking to Eric Kuhn Thursday (write a book together – bonded for life) who pointed out that the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center has started running its models for 2025 runoff. They don’t look good.
It’s way too early to think of this as a “forecast.” But they provide a feel for where we’re at now: Do we have a good head start? Are we already behind? The error bars are still huge, with a lot of upside potential, but we are alreadybehind – 1.4 million acre feet below median for Lake Powell inflow.
The current climate forecast headlights, which can at least dimly illuminate the next month for us, don’t look good. The US Drought Monitor folks publish an experimental forecast tool called the Evaporative Demand Drought Index (EDDI).
EDDI uses the federal Climate Forecast System model, an operational model to help gauge conditions over the coming months. CFS is then coupled with tools to estimate evaporative demand – not simply how much snow we’re going to get, but how rain and snow interact with temperature and atmospheric moisture, all of which play roles in the system that sends water from the snowpack in the Rockies to headgates and kitchen taps across the West.
EDDI says that over the next month, we should expect the CBRFC’s runoff forecast to go down, not up. We’re falling behind.
Why this matters
The obvious reason this matters is its direct relationship with this year’s water management. Will Powell and Mead go up or down? What does that mean for near term water supply?
But we’re also all playing multiple games of four-dimensional chess trying to anticipate how the near term runoff scenarios influence long term negotiations over Post-26 river management. One of my little projects right now is to step back from my normative angst (where “normative angst” == John’s super pissed off about the negotiators’ abject failure) to think about the deeper negotiation theory stuff going on.
Here’s a look Westwide.
Westwide SNOTEL basin filled map December 21, 2024 via the NRCS.
The Interior Department on Friday finalized its updated Western Solar Plan, potentially opening 31.7 million acres of federal public lands in the West to industrial solar energy development, including some 3.8 million acres in Wyoming.
The decision comes just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, and just hours before a potential federal government shutdown.
The Wyoming acreage considered suitable for solar energy represents about 20% of land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management in the state, according to the BLM. Suitable areas in Wyoming exclude sage grouse core areas and avoid ungulate migration corridors and unindustrialized areas, according to federal officials.
The plan updates an effort initiated in 2012, when the federal government under then-President Barack Obama envisioned industrial-scale solar would be concentrated in very high solar potential areas of the southwest. The updated version, however — part of President Joe Biden’s goals to expand renewable energy development to address climate change — expanded the study area to include several more western states, including Wyoming.
This planning map depicts Bureau of Land Management managed areas in Wyoming that may be suitable and unsuitable for industrial-scale solar energy development. (U.S. Bureau of Land Management)
Both the Interior and BLM have insisted that although the plan identifies 31.7 million acres as suitable for development, only about 700,000 acres across the West are “anticipated” to be developed.
“The larger available area allows for greater flexibility in considering solar proposals,” according to the Interior, which stressed that each solar project will be analyzed individually and include opportunities for public input.
“With an updated Western Solar Plan, created with extensive input from the public, the Department will ensure the responsible development of solar energy across the West for decades to come,” outgoing Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a prepared statement.
Initial reactions
Conservation groups expressed tentative support for the finalized plan hours after the decision was published Friday in the Federal Register.
“The Western Solar Plan will play a crucial role in securing our country’s energy independence and security over the coming decade,” Natural Resources Defense Council Senior Policy Advocate Josh Axelrod said in a prepared statement. “This is a rare piece of policy that can drive job growth, boost rural economies and ensure conservation of fragile environmental resources.”
The updated Western Solar Plan “represents a compromise that will allow Wyoming to continue to innovate and grow its energy economy while protecting our important conservation resources on BLM-managed public lands,” The Nature Conservancy said in a prepared statement.
he conservancy published a study of the Western Solar Plan revision effort in 2023. “There’s an abundance of low-impact spots for the development of solar energy in Wyoming — more than enough to meet market demand,” TNC’s Wyoming Energy Program Director Justin Loyka told WyoFile at the time.
But whether federal officials fully embraced input from conservation groups and others wasn’t clear during first-blush readings of the final plan on Friday.
“The plan is just really haphazard,” San José State University Professor of Environmental Studies Dustin Mulvaney told WyoFile. “To me, it’s a recipe for more litigation and more lawsuits and more people getting upset just because of the free-for-all-nature of it.”
This map, provided by The Nature Conservancy, depicts areas where the group, during the Bureau of Land Management’s planning process, noted potential impacts to big game migration corridors and crucial winter habitat. The agency largely addressed those concerns in its final plan, according to The Nature Conservancy. (The Nature Conservancy)
It was unclear, Mulvaney said, whether federal officials fully integrated many innovative strategies tested to avoid negative impacts in sensitive landscapes.
Although Interior officials attempted to correct course — learning from mistakes in past sitings of solar energy development in the southwest — the agency strayed into new, dangerous territory when it expanded its solar energy scope to other western states, according to Mulvaney.
For example, one criteria it used to essentially disqualify public lands from being off limits to solar development was the presence of invasive plant species such as cheatgrass. Not only does that overlook other landscape values like wildlife habitat connectivity, such invasive plant species typically spread by following other forms of development like wind farms.
“Because of the presence of cheatgrass, it opens up a lot of those landscapes to solar development,” Mulvaney said. “It’s not thinking about questions about, like, ‘Where might we be interrupting migration corridors and [genetic connections]?’ All these things are connected.”
