On a picture perfect, late-March bluebird day in the Colorado mountains, Rob Krueger and Jay Joslyn gear up for a unique job at Denver Water — venturing into the wilderness to measure snowpack.
Boots? Check. Gloves? Check. Hats? Check. Jackets? Check. Very special metal tube and a scale? Check, check. All of it is loaded into their winter travel vehicle, a snowcat.
Denver Water owns a snowcat that is used to access facilities and remote locations during the winter months in Grand County. Photo credit: Denver Water.
“We’re heading up to Vasquez Creek to one of our snow courses,” Krueger says as he fires up the Tucker 2000XL and starts rolling. “It’s around 10 miles up to our destination, and it takes about 30-40 minutes in the snowcat.”
The journey starts at Denver Water’s Grand County office just west of Fraser and heads into the Arapaho National Forest.
“The snowcat is kind of like a truck with tank-like tracks on it,” Krueger said. “We use it throughout the winter to reach our remote buildings and dams and to get to our snow courses.”
The journey would be impossible in a regular car or truck. But the snowcat, designed to tackle this type of terrain, easily powers over the snow.
“We’re a 24/7 operation so we need a vehicle like this in the winter,” he said. “Whether it’s snowing, sleeting, raining or we have 60-mile-per-hour winds and it’s negative 6 degrees out, we still have to get around. So that’s what makes the snowcat such an important piece of equipment for us.”
Rob Krueger drives the snowcat through a snow-covered road near Winter Park. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Krueger drives the snowcat through the trees on a snow-covered U.S. Forest Service road and into Denver Water’s collection system.
The collection system is the area where Denver Water captures melting snow during the spring runoff. The water then flows through creeks, canals, tunnels and reservoirs to treatment facilities on the Front Range where it’s cleaned for delivery to 1.5 million people in metro Denver.
After reaching their destination, Krueger and Joslyn get ready for their task of measuring the snowpack.
Snowshoes are strapped on and equipment, including a snow measuring tube, is assembled for the trek across Vasquez Creek to reach a “snow course.”
“A snow course is basically a preset path where we take samples to measure the snowpack,” Joslyn said. “We do these same courses four times over the winter.”
The courses are set up across Colorado’s mountains and managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Resources Conservation Service, also known as the NRCS, to monitor snowpack. The data from these courses are used by cities, farmers, ranchers, water utilities and recreationists to help predict the amount of water that will flow down the mountains during the spring runoff.
Joslyn and Krueger snowshoe across Vasquez Creek to reach the snow course. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Denver Water partners with the NRCS to do snow courses in Grand, Park and Summit counties where the utility collects its water.
In Grand County, there are five locations where Denver Water samples snow.
The Vasquez snow course starts a few feet from the creek and is surrounded by a canopy of spruce and fir trees. On this trip, the snow on the course ranged from 4 to 5 feet deep.
Joslyn stabs the snow with the measuring tube to collect a snow sample. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Joslyn carries the measuring tube [Federal Snow Sampler], then stabs it into the snow and checks the reading. He calls out “53,” which is the depth of the snow in inches. Then he takes a closer look at the slots on the tube and calls out a second number; this one is the length of the snow core captured inside.
Next up, Joslyn uses a handheld scale to weigh the tube with the snow inside. “42,” he calls out. This time referring to the weight in ounces.
Krueger records this number, then subtracts the weight of the empty tube from the total, which gives the water content in inches of the snow core sample. They also calculate the density of the snow.
Joslyn weighs the tube with the snow inside. The process is used to determine the water content and density of the snowpack. Photo credit: Denver Water.
The pair does the same process 10 times at 25-foot intervals on the course. On this trip, the snowpack was in good shape, coming in at 118% of normal for the end of March 2025.
“Denver Water has a long history in this valley, and we’ve been doing snow courses in Grand County dating back to 1939,” Krueger said. “With decades worth of data, we can get a really good idea of how much water we’ll see during the spring runoff.”
The data is sent to Denver Water’s planning department and the NRCS. Planners combine the snow course information with data from SNOTEL sites and high-tech flights over the mountains to predict how much water will flow into the utility’s reservoirs where water is stored for customers.
“The information from the snow courses is critical to our planning, as it gives us boots-on-the-ground information about the snowpack,” said Nathan Elder, water supply manager at Denver Water. “Our crews in the mountains often have to brave a lot of harsh weather to get the data we need, so we’re thankful for their hard work.”
Working for Denver Water in Grand County involves a variety of jobs that change throughout the seasons, with the snow courses being one of the most unique.
“The snow courses are interesting and of course being out in the snow and driving the snowcat is pretty fun,” Krueger said. “Our work feels valuable to Denver Water as a whole to understand what kind of water resource we have to send to the city.”
The city of Denver along with Jefferson County, The Mile High Flood District and the city of Wheat Ridge presented options for potential upgrades to the Clear Creek Trail during an open house in early April at Centennial Elementary School.
A section of the trail near Inspiration Point may get an upgrade for people that bike and walk. Currently, trail-users headed west must cross over West 52nd Avenue and then travel down about 1,100 feet of Gray Street, a residential street, before reaching the trail again.
The new plans unveiled at the open house offered five different options for new routes to avoid going down Gray Street, and all of them included under passes or bridges so trail users won’t have to cross West 52nd Avenue at grade anymore.
All of the options presented include new bridges or underpasses and involve several different routes that meander between Marshall Street and West 53rd Avenue. All of the proposed routes are west of the residences on Gray Street and south of Interstate 76. A study of the trail is expected to be completed in the fall.
At the meeting, residents were given the option to rank the five options and pick their favorites and least favorites. To learn more and give input on the potential routes, people can visit https://bit.ly/ClearCreekTrail. A current survey is open until April 18. [ed. emphasis mine]
Straight line diagram of the Lower Arkansas Valley ditches via Headwaters Magazine
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
April 6, 2025
Colorado Springs’ latest annexations, now under challenge, have left Arkansas River communities wary
As a worker maneuvered a massive leveler in the fields behind their house, Alan and Peggy Frantz pondered the future of their Rocky Ford farm — and their larger agricultural community strung along the Lower Arkansas River east of Pueblo. The collapse of it all doesn’t feel too far out, too improbable, Alan Frantz said. Maybe not in their lifetimes, the couple said, but they’ve made sure to send their kids to college in case it all goes away.
“At some point, the cities just have to stop growing,” Alan Frantz said. “If you want a Dust Bowl like the ’30s, go ahead and take all the water, dry this all up.”
Flood irrigation in the Arkansas Valley via Greg Hobbs
Colorado Springs is one of the cities Frantz and many of his neighbors worry most about — and now they fear a proposed 6,500-home annexation to that city will increase pressure on its utilities to source more water from the Arkansas. The farmers use the river to irrigate more than 220,000 acres of farmland, the economic backbone of the region. Already, Colorado Springs Utilities estimates it will need 34,000 more acre-feet of water — or 11 billion gallons — annually to meet population growth for when the city fully develops inside its current boundaries, estimated to occur around 2070. Every annexation of land into the state’s second-largest city adds to that future gap. Without water, there is no farming. And without farming, Frantz said, there would be no towns along the Lower Arkansas as it stretches from Pueblo to the Kansas border…
The controversy around the Colorado Springs annexation is the most recent flashpoint illustrating one of the central tensions in the state: Colorado’s cities do not have enough water to meet projected growth and climate change is shrinking the finite amount of water available. Where should the cities go for more supply? Who will give up their water? The decades-old battle plays out across the state as growing Front Range communities seek new water sources. Communities on the Western Slope fear more of their water will be routed east across the Continental Divide, especially as the region’s largest river shrinks. Farmers and ranchers in the San Luis Valley successfully fought off an attempt by a company to pipe water from the valley’s depleting aquifer to ever-growing Douglas County. Aurora’s $80-million purchase of Otero County water rights last year rankled water leaders in southeastern Colorado, prompting threats of litigation.
Colorado transmountain diversions via the State Engineer’s office
Perkins County Canal Project Area. Credit: Nebraska Department of Natural Resources
Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Politics website (Marianne Goodland). Here’s an excerpt:
April 7, 2025
On or around April 17, six landowners in Sedgwick County will face a decision: whether to sell their land to the state of Nebraska for a canal that will be at least partially constructed in Colorado, or face what is likely to be an unprecedented land grab…The history of the proposed canal dates back more than 100 years, to the compact between Colorado and Nebraska regarding water from the South Platte River. Article VI of the compact states that Nebraska can divert 500 cubic feet per second during the non-irrigation season, as well as any additional available flows, into the canal. That non-irrigation season runs from Oct. 15 to April 1…
However, Nebraska claims that Colorado has increased its own diversions and related water uses during the non-irrigation season, leaving Nebraska with no choice but to construct the canal and claim its non-irrigation season water. The canal would start just east of Ovid, in Sedgwick County, and continue into Perkins County, just across the state line in Nebraska. The 1923 compact allows Nebraska to build the canal, using eminent domain, and to seek it in federal court if necessary.
People work on the Perkins County Canal in the 1890s. The project eventually was abandoned due to financial troubles. But remnants are still visible near Julesburg.
Perkins County Historical Society
For one state to grab the land of another is unprecedented, Attorney General Phil Weiser told Colorado Politics earlier this year. While Colorado agreed to the canal in 1923, that’s not how Weiser sees it now. Weiser sent a letter to the Sedgwick County commissioners in January, stating that he is opposed to Nebraska’s potential action. He wrote that he had advised Nebraska’s attorney general that the project would provide little to no benefit to the state of Nebraska. However, if Nebraska moves forward, Colorado will defend its rights, he added.
Perkins canal drawing showing the Colorado portion, courtesy Nebraska Department of Natural Resources.
F Street in Salida February 2025. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
April 8, 2025
Federal funds for climate-change-related projects in Colorado have started arriving in almost perfect concert with the spring thaw.
Among the applications for the hundreds of millions of dollars will be:
energy efficiency work in southwestern Colorado communities,
curbing methane emissions from old coal mines west of Carbondale, and,
preparation of a climate action plan for the Yampa Valley.
Among the smaller grants, $187,605 went to Salida and Chaffee County. The money will fund a staff position shared by the two jurisdictions to create a greenhouse gas inventory, a climate action plan, and then the means to implement what the city and county decide to do.
That grant and seven others for rural Colorado jurisdictions from the U.S. Department of Energy totaling $1.865 million were announced in August 2024. The federal program had received key funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021.
The awards were temporarily frozen by President Donald Trump.
The money is largely to be used for staffing for climate action planning but also for workforce training in communities where extraction and combustion of fossil fuels has been fading.
“Capacity is an essential component of local climate action, and these new awards will play an important role in enabling this work in Colorado’s rural and mountain communities,” Christine Berg, senior policy advisor for local governments in the Colorado Energy Office, said in the August 2024 announcement.
A far larger grant of $200 million to the Denver Regional Council of Governments, or DRCOG, had been announced in July 2024.
That money, a product of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, was to have been used for retrofits of buildings in the nine-county metropolitan area. DRCOG did not respond to repeated requests as to whether the money has been unthawed or is expected to be.
The Colorado Energy Office had been awarded $129 million. A spokesperson confirmed the money has arrived. It will be used:
To deploy advanced methane monitoring technology to produce data that will inform regulatory policy concerning methane emissions from landfills and coal mines, including those in the Redstone-Paonia area.
For energy efficiency and electrification upgrades in large commercial buildings that are otherwise hard to decarbonize.
To help local governments to implement projects that help reduce emissions from buildings, transportation, electric power, waste and other economic sectors. The money is to be administered through a new program, the Local Government Climate Action Accelerator.
Part of the $129 million received by the Colorado Energy Office will be used to work on large commercial buildings that are hard to decarbonize. Photo/Allen Best
What melted the ice?
The Trump administration’s budget office on Jan. 20 had ordered a pause on previously promised funds if they helped advance the “green new deal,” as the Congressional laws adopted when Joe Biden was president have been called. A federal court issued a temporary restraining order in late January, but the Trump administration seemed to ignore it.
Colorado in early February joined 21 other states and the District of Columbia in asking the court to require the federal agencies to release the money.
Will Toor, the executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, at the time declared that the federal government had signed contracts granting more than $500 million to Colorado through the 2021 and 2022 federal laws. “By not meeting these contractual obligations, the federal government is inflicting real harm on our state,” he said in a statement posted on the CEO website.
The Trump administration seemed to ignore the legal requirement, and a federal court judge on March 6 ordered the administration to comply.
Judge John J. McConnell Jr., of the Federal District Court for the District of Rhode Island, said the case amounted to executive overreach. The directive from the White House budget office, he said in a New York Times story, “fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government.” Without his action, he said, “the funding that the states are due and owed creates an indefinite limbo.” A federal appeals court on March 26 upheld that decision.
On March 28, Colorado Energy Office spokesman Ari Rosenblum reported that the $129 million in funding announced last summer for the state agency has been unfrozen.
“We are moving forward with work on all projects funded through this grant,” he wrote in an e-mail in response to a query from Big Pivots. “We expect to launch the Local Government Climate Action Accelerator this summer.”
What melted the ice?
The Trump administration’s budget office on Jan. 20 had ordered a pause on previously promised funds if they helped advance the “green new deal,” as the Congressional laws adopted when Joe Biden was president have been called. A federal court issued a temporary restraining order in late January, but the Trump administration seemed to ignore it.
Colorado in early February joined 21 other states and the District of Columbia in asking the court to require the federal agencies to release the money.
Will Toor, the executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, at the time declared that the federal government had signed contracts granting more than $500 million to Colorado through the 2021 and 2022 federal laws. “By not meeting these contractual obligations, the federal government is inflicting real harm on our state,” he said in a statement posted on the CEO website.
The Trump administration seemed to ignore the legal requirement, and a federal court judge on March 6 ordered the administration to comply.
Judge John J. McConnell Jr., of the Federal District Court for the District of Rhode Island, said the case amounted to executive overreach. The directive from the White House budget office, he said in a New York Times story, “fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government.” Without his action, he said, “the funding that the states are due and owed creates an indefinite limbo.” A federal appeals court on March 26 upheld that decision.
On March 28, Colorado Energy Office spokesman Ari Rosenblum reported that the $129 million in funding announced last summer for the state agency has been unfrozen.
“We are moving forward with work on all projects funded through this grant,” he wrote in an e-mail in response to a query from Big Pivots. “We expect to launch the Local Government Climate Action Accelerator this summer.”
Projects in rural Colorado
The $1.8 million grant — this is in addition to the program for local assistance that the Colorado Energy Office created with its $129 million — funded projects for Salida and Chaffee County and these additional rural communities:
$240,000 for Lake County to support a new position to lead development of the county’s first climate action plan and implement the county’s climate initiatives in and around Leadville. These and other similar positions are for three years.
$240,000 to the Colorado River Valley Economic Development Partnership, which has representatives of municipalities from New Castle and Silt on the east and Parachute and Battlement Mesa, as well as parts of unincorporated Garfield County. The project has a strong emphasis on workforce development and new job training in a county that formerly had a strong component of fossil fuel extraction.
$264,100 to the Routt County Climate Action Plan Collaborative. The money is to scale up electrification in Hayden, Oak Creek, Steamboat Springs and Yampa as well as other parts of Rout County. As with the Colorado River communities, there will be a workforce development and job training component as two coal-burning units at Hayden will close in the next several years. The coal for the plant comes from Twentymile Mine.
$240,000 to Pueblo and Pueblo County for a staff position for implementing city and county sustainability projects.
$240,000 to the City of Durango for a staff position to be housed within the Four Corners Office for Resource Efficiency to work with La Plata Electric Association and the city government to implement energy efficiency and so forth.
$191,100 to EcoAction Partners, a consortium of San Miguel and Ouray counties along with the towns of Telluride, Mountain Village, Ophir, and Norward. This money is to provide staffing to assist the 10 jurisdiction members with climate action plan projects and programming implementation.
$262,194 to Larimer County to help with staffing to develop a climate action plan for Estes Park and ensure alignment with Larimer County climate Smart Future Ready plan.
A $240,000 grant was awarded to the City of Durango to work with the a local non-profit group, the Four Corners Office for Resource Efficiency, and La Plata Electric Association on energy efficiency. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Salida tree grant
Salida will also receive another $250,000 to cover the costs of planting trees in a somewhat newer but lower-income neighborhood during the next five years.
The older part of Salida that can be seen along F Street, the town’s older commercial corridor, has many tall shade trees. The town’s southeast corner, though, is an area converted from light industrial and commercial into manufactured and other housing. It has a paucity of trees.
Sara Law, Salida’s sustainability coordinator and public information officer, explained that Salida expects to get hotter during summer months in coming decades because of accumulating greenhouse gases. The goal was to get medium- to low-tree covers to help provide cooling on those hot days of summer.
Awardees of that grant program, including Salida, are now able to work on their tree projects and submit for reimbursement.
Teddy Parker-Renga, associate director of communications and communities for the Colorado State Forest Service, reported on March 31 that awardees of that particular grant program, including Salida, had become eligible that day to submit reimbursements for their work. The money comes from the U.S. Forest Service and grants are administered by the Colorado State Forest Service.
At an elevation of 7,400 feet, Salida has a climate warm enough to accommodate rattlesnakes. They can be encountered on hiking trails of nearby Methodist Mountain, the northernmost peak in the Sangre de Cristo Range. Salida’s all-time high temperature record of 102 degrees was set in July 2019.
The construction site at the bottom of Gross Dam with equipment used to place concrete and build the new steps. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
April 7, 2025
The state’s largest water utility will have two weeks to complete any necessary work on its $531 million dam expansion project before a court-ordered construction halt takes effect, a federal judge ruled Sunday. The granting of a temporary window for construction follows an order late Thursday by U.S. District Court Judge Christine Arguello blocking Denver Water’s expansion of Gross Reservoir outside Nederland and barring further construction work to raise the height of the dam…In response to the order, Denver Water asked the judge to allow dam construction to continue while the utility appealed her decision.
“Denver Water faces enormous irreparable harm from the order stopping ongoing project construction, which may threaten the safety of the half-constructed dam; require Denver Water to quickly lay off hundreds of construction workers; impose millions in additional materials and equipment costs on Denver Water and its ratepayers; and increase the risk of water shortages,” lawyers for the utility wrote in their request.
Arguello denied the utility’s request to allow construction to continue during the appeal but granted the 14-day stay on her order blocking all construction. After a yet-to-be-scheduled hearing, she will decide exactly how much more construction to allow to make the existing dam structurally sound…Arguello in her Sunday order reiterated her criticism of Denver Water’s decision to start construction even though it faced challenges to the legality of the project.
“The financial concerns argued by Denver Water do not outweigh the irreparable injury of environmental harm,” the judge wrote. “Denver Water took a calculated risk when it decided to move forward with construction despite the lawsuit.”
The Northern Integrated Supply Project, currently estimated at $2 billion, would create two new reservoirs and a system of pipelines to capture more drinking water for 15 community water suppliers. Credit: Northern Water project pages
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
March 5, 2025
Two new bodies of water in northern Front Range will boost water supplies for 15 communities
Plans for a $2 billion water supply project in northern Colorado will move forward after the communities supporting it agreed to pump $100 million into improving the health of the Cache la Poudre River — a settlement ending decades of dispute over the water infrastructure plans. Leaders from the Northern Integrated Supply Project and the nonprofit environmental group Save the Poudre finalized the settlement on Friday, clearing the way for two new reservoirs. The deal will funnel $100 million over 20 years into a fund to sustain 50 miles of the river from the mouth of the Poudre Canyon, northwest of Fort Collins, to the river’s confluence with the South Platte. The Poudre River Improvement Fund will pay for projects to enhance the river’s flows, water quality, ecosystem and recreational opportunities. The settlement ends Save the Poudre’s 2024 lawsuit alleging the Army Corps of Engineers did not adequately consider the environmental impacts of the Northern Integrated Supply Project when it issued a Clean Water Act permit for its construction. Environmentalists with the group have opposed the project for decades because it would drain the river and damage its ecosystems…
Northern Water, the utility that’s spearheading the project, and other water suppliers have pursued the water infrastructure improvements since 1980, stating they are critical to meeting the needs of the growing region. When complete, the Northern Integrated Supply Project will include Glade Reservoir northwest of Fort Collins, Galeton Reservoir northeast of Greeley, 50 miles of buried water pipelines and five pump plants. The project will send more than 40,000 acre-feet of water annually to the participating water suppliers in Boulder, Weld and Larimer counties — enough water for about 80,000 households.
“This is a milestone day for the communities participating in the project,” Northern Water General Manager Brad Wind said in a news release. “The settlement agreement will close the permitting process for the project, open the door to constructing a project that will deliver much-needed water supplies to vibrant communities, and allow for dozens of large-scale riverine investments in and along the Poudre River.”
Construction of Glade Reservoir is expected to begin in 2026. It will hold about 170,000 acre-feet of water from the Poudre River — a capacity slightly larger than that of Horsetooth Reservoir, according to Northern Water’s release. Construction of 45,600-acre-foot Galeton Reservoir will begin after the first reservoir is complete, and it will store water from the South Platte. An acre-foot of water is enough to support two Colorado households for a year. The project will support water supplies for 15 towns and water districts in northern Colorado, including the Fort Collins-Loveland Water District, the Left Hand Water District, Fort Morgan and Erie.
Roller-compacted concrete will be placed on top of the existing dam to raise it to a new height of 471 feet. A total of 118 new steps will make up the new dam. Image credit: Denver Water.
From email from Denver Water:
April 4, 2025
Denver Water is gravely concerned about this ruling and its ramifications for the future of metro Denver and its water supply. We plan to appeal and seek an immediate stay of this order that leaves a critical project that is 60% complete on hold and puts at risk our ability to efficiently provide a safe, secure and reliable water supply to 1.5 million people. Denver Water will do everything in its power to see this project through to completion.
It’s impossible to reconcile the judge’s order with what is clearly in the broader public interest.
We view this decision as a radical remedy that should raise alarm bells with the public, not only because of its impacts to water security in an era of longer, deeper droughts, catastrophic wildfire and extreme weather, but because it serves as an egregious example of how difficult it has become to build critical infrastructure in the face of relentless litigation and a broken permitting process. In this case, the order is even more appalling with the project so deep into construction.
Denver Water will abide by the judge’s order and temporarily halt construction on the dam pending a hearing with the judge and will rapidly appeal the decision. Work for the spring season was scheduled to begin April 10, and the final part of the dam raise was to be completed this year. Leaving the project incomplete creates ongoing safety and water supply issues, as Denver Water cannot fill the reservoir to capacity during construction and, as we have testified to the judge, the original gravity dam has been deconstructed and its foundation excavated, exposing steep rock slopes that depend on bolts to temporarily shore them up. These are among the issues that we will address with the judge in an upcoming hearing.
This order is also exacting a significant human cost, as it comes just as Denver Water and its contractors were preparing for spring construction season. With an extended freeze on construction, hundreds of men and women will be thrown out of work, many with specific skillsets who relocated to the region to work on this specific project. It also required enormous effort over years from Denver Water and its contractors to build the workforce for this complex project. All of that now stands in jeopardy, causing immediate harm to our valued workers, their families, the dozens of business partners, and our local economy.
It’s crucial to understand that Denver Water was granted all required local, state and federal permits to move ahead with the project after a regulatory oversight process stretching over nearly two decades, dating to 2002. Further, Denver Water has committed more than $30 million to over 60 environmental mitigation and enhancement projects on the Front Range and West Slope. The utility proceeded with construction on the expansion in 2022, under an order from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to complete the project by 2027.
On top of that legally binding FERC order, Denver Water has an enormous sense of urgency surrounding the project, considering increasingly variable weather and water supply patterns, how close we have come to falling short of water on the north side of our system in years past, our harrowing experiences with the threats and impacts of wildfire in our collection area and the need for system flexibility to ensure we can provide a critical public resource under crisis conditions.
To be clear, these are not theoretical matters. Denver has seen the impact of drought and catastrophic wildfire before. The starkest example came in 2002, when extended drought and fast-moving wildfire struck the region in dramatic fashion. Denver Water came very close to being unable to provide our northern customers with safe, clean drinking water – an absolute human health and safety priority, and the responsibility of this utility, as the region’s water provider.
Denver Water is also missing opportunities to store additional, critical water supplies. Had the expansion been complete in 2013, for example, Denver Water could have easily filled Gross Reservoir, including storing additional storm water during the catastrophic flooding that year. In 2015, water flowed out of state because existing Denver Water reservoirs were full and there was no place to capture and store it. In the hot, dry 2018 summer, we would have been able to provide extra water to the Fraser River or Williams Fork River basin to help enhance the conditions of these dry rivers.
The expansion of Gross Reservoir is intended to protect the people who rely on us, now and in the future. The Gross Reservoir expansion reduces the significant pressure on our southern system, which delivers 80% of our water supply, depends heavily on the South Platte River and has seen a series of wildfires that threaten water delivery, water quality and water treatment. In both 1996 and 2002, sediment loads from deluges following the Buffalo Creek and Hayman fires created impacts to our southern system that challenged our ability to ensure water supply to our customers; we are still addressing these impacts to this very day.
Denver Water is responsible for providing a safe and secure water supply for 1.5 million people in Denver and portions of the surrounding metro area and has understood the urgency of the Gross Reservoir expansion since the 1990s, when the environmental community recommended expansion of the reservoir as part of a plan to address future supply and water security.
To repeat: The utility began working on permitting for this project in 2002, more than 20 years ago. The project has been analyzed and permitted in various forms by no fewer than seven state and federal environmental agencies, and Denver Water has consulted extensively with environmental organizations, nonprofits, the public and other stakeholders to identify efforts to enhance and reasonably restore resources on both the West Slope and Front Range. Denver Water is operating under a legally mandated deadline for project completion in 2027 from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is not part of this current lawsuit.
Throughout the permitting process, Denver Water has been driven by these values: the need to do this expansion the right way and the safe way, by involving the community; upholding the highest environmental standards; providing a sustainable, high-quality water supply to our customers; and protecting and managing the water and natural environment that define Colorado. In keeping with these values, Denver Water designed and implemented the project to provide a net environmental benefit to impacted local watersheds.
Denver Water looks forward to working with the agencies and the courts to move this critical project toward completion.
Workers from Denver Water and contractor Kiewit Barnard stand in front of Gross Dam in May 2024 to mark the start of the dam raise process. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
April 4, 2025
Colorado’s largest water provider must stop construction on a $531 million dam expansion already underway in Boulder County after a federal judge found that assessments of how the project would impact the environment were flawed. U.S. District Court Judge Christine Arguello in an order late Thursday blocked Denver Water from enlarging Gross Reservoir east of Nederland until major federal environmental permitting processes are redone. The judge found that allowing the reservoir expansion to continue without redoing the permits would cause irreparable environmental damage that cannot be compensated for by monetary payments. That harm would outweigh any financial costs Denver Water would incur from halting construction, she wrote.
“Environmental injury is often the very definition of irreparable harm — often permanent or at least of long duration,” Arguello wrote. “All parties agree that there will be environmental harm resulting from completion of the Moffat Collection System Project, including the destruction of 500,000 trees, water diversion from several creeks, and impacts to wildlife by the sudden loss of land.”
She issued a preliminary injunction ordering Denver Water to halt construction on the dam until a further hearing when engineers can explain how much further construction is needed to make the partially built dam safe and structurally sound. Denver Water planned to raise the height of the dam by 131 feet, allowing the utility to store more water. She will then issue a permanent injunction on how much more construction will be allowed. The order is a huge victory for environmental groups that for years have opposed the controversial project. A coalition of environmental groups first filed suit in 2018 to stop the expansion of the reservoir, which they say would harm the health of the Colorado River system — where the reservoir’s water is sourced.
Snowfall in March has helped decrease the likelihood of drought developing this spring in Colorado’s northwest mountains. However, a warm and dry spring could still change the tide heading into summer. The National Weather Service, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, released its latest seasonal drought outlook on Thursday, March 20. It showed that drought conditions are unlikely to develop in most of northwest Colorado through June…Brad Pugh, a forecaster with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate prediction center, said these outlooks predominantly take into account the current conditions, climatology temperature and precipitation outlooks over the next three months.
“In northwestern Colorado at this time of year, you know going into the springtime, mountain snowpack is a critical factor,” Pugh said.
As of March 18, much of northwest Colorado was in line with, or just above, normal snowpack. This has continued to improve in the state’s north-central mountains since January. According to OpenSnow, as of Monday the snow totals and percentage of normal on the season so far were as follows:
Winter Park – 315 inches (117%)
Copper Mountain Resort – 303 inches (113%)
Vail Mountain – 292 inches (101%)
Breckenridge Ski Resort – 284 inches (107%)
Steamboat Resort – 279 inches (108%)
Aspen Highlands — 267 inches (88%)
Loveland Ski Area – 261 inches (108%)
Snowmass – 243 inches (83%)
Keystone Resort – 239 inches (107%)
Beaver Creek – 227 inches (108%)
Arapahoe Basin Ski Area – 225 inches (112%)
Aspen Mountain – 210 inches (92%)
Ski Cooper – 206 inches (106%)
Buttermilk – 147 inches (89%)
Colorado Drought Monitor map March 25, 2025.
The latest U.S. Drought Monitor for Colorado reported no drought in many of the northwest counties including Summit, Grand, Routt and Jackson counties as well as the eastern reaches of Eagle and Moffat counties. Heading west, the monitor shows abnormally dry conditions in Pitkin County and the eastern portions of Garfield and Rio Blanco counties. Conditions continue to get progressively drier the further west toward the border.
Talk Given to Business for Water Stewardship on March 10, 2025
In Colorado, we confront challenges as opportunities. As Wallace Stegner, the famed Western writer, once put it—it’s impossible to be pessimistic in the West; it’s the native land of hope. How we manage our water is a test of that ethos.
There are no two ways to put this: we face significant water scarcity challenges in Colorado and the West. That scarcity is driven, in part, by increasing demands as population booms. And it’s also driven by our changing climate, which is reducing snowpack, changing runoff patterns, increasing evaporation, and drying soils.
While we know that climate change significantly impacts Colorado’s water, its extent and exact impact is presently unknown. That uncertainty, coupled with the unpredictability in rainfall and snowpack, is destabilizing—making it difficult for farmers, ranchers, and even cities to know what to expect each year or how to plan for the future. Unfortunately, the variable weather patterns we are seeing are very likely to be our new normal, creating considerable pressure for us to create more adaptive and resilient systems for water management.
Increased uncertainty and unpredictability in water make planning more important than ever, with an imperative of developing new and innovative strategies for water management. It is no exaggeration to say that the future success of Colorado will depend, in considerable part, on our ability to adapt to scarcity and reduce the uncertainty and unpredictability that come with it. The best and most durable solutions will go beyond individual success and will collaborate with other interests to find win-win solutions.
I know this is important to Business for Water Stewardship, and I’m excited to talk with you about it today. I also want to speak about how our management of water must remain intertwined with respect for the rule of law, as the solutions we craft are only as good as the laws they are built upon and the institutions charged with implementing and upholding them.
I. Moving Toward a Resilient and Adaptive System of Water Management
Adapting to scarcity and creating more certainty will require us to develop innovative and collaborative strategies for water management. It will also require collective action. We cannot focus on individual successes and ignore the community in which these projects occur. I appreciate how you captured this point on your website:
We believe businesses have an opportunity—and a responsibility— to ensure that their operations and investments improve communities and ecosystems where they do business. And in water-stressed regions, that responsibility is deeply rooted in how we value, use, and protect water. That’s why we help businesses work collaboratively with community and policy stakeholders to advance solutions that ensure people, economies, and ecosystems have enough clean water to flourish.[1]
I couldn’t agree more. Each of us, whether as businesses or individuals, has a responsibility to ensure that, wherever we can, we work to improve communities and ecosystems where we live and work. Let me begin by focusing on a few projects that have done that. And I want to contrast those with projects that do not.
The Maybell Diversion Project is a wonderful example of a project that has multiple benefits. Updating and modernizing the Maybell Diversion Project improved efficiency for irrigation, increases resiliency to drought, and benefitted threatened and endangered species.[2]
Before the project was completed in 2024, irrigators from Maybell Irrigation District had to trudge two hours through steep, rugged sagebrush country to manually open and close the rusted and broken metal headgate.[3] It was an arduous, yet crucial task because Maybell is one of the largest irrigation diversions on the Yampa.[4]
The Nature Conservancy worked with numerous partners to help fund the $6.8M project. Funding partners include: the Bureau of Reclamation’s WaterSMART program; the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation; the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program,[5] and the Colorado Water Conservation Board.[6]
Today, the opening and closing of the Maybell headgate can be controlled remotely and is determined by a combination of water user needs and available flows into the Maybell Ditch. The Maybell Irrigation District also coordinates with the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program and the Division of Water Resources to guide water use in the Lower Yampa.[7]
As I said previously, this project promises mutual benefits. It allows continued irrigation of historical lands, which supports local farmers and the economy. At the same time, it also improves fish habitat and removes barriers to boat passage, supporting the environment and secondary economic benefits like river recreation.
In 2021, I spoke to the Colorado Water Congress about “The Imperative of Investing in Water Infrastructure.”[8] In that speech, I highlighted important water infrastructure projects around the state, including a plan to replace the aging Grand Valley Hydroelectric facility with a new more efficient plant capable of producing 1.5 times as much power. Like the Maybell Diversion Project, that plan brought multiple benefits. In addition to producing more clean electricity, their continued use of the water right will ensure that water flows into the 15-mile Reach, a critical stretch of river for four species of endangered fish. Many local irrigators will also benefit from increased diversions at an upstream diversion point supplying the plant.
In that speech, I also emphasized the importance of developing funding sources and investment opportunities in water infrastructure. I mentioned a few success stories, like Proposition DD, HB 21-1260, which provides $20 million in funding for implementation of the Colorado Water Plan, and HB 21-240, which provides $30 million for watershed restoration in response to wildfires, including funding for flood prevention and mitigation. But those are not enough. With continued growth on the horizon, our commitment to fund projects laid out in the Colorado Water Plan is imperative. That plan is the roadmap for investing in our future and fulfilling the Plan’s vision will take billions of dollars.
Photo credit: Rye Resurgence Project
B. Rye Resurgence Project
The Rye Resurgence Project in the San Luis Valley supports continued farming, while reducing water use, improving soil health, and helping the community flourish.
During this time of drought, it is critical that we find ways to use less water without sacrificing economic opportunities. This can help build resilience in the face of shrinking water supplies. Crops, like rye, can use far less water—up to 40%—than other similar crops like barley or oats.[9] This difference is huge in a region that is trying to conserve water in order to balance Rio Grande water use with supply. Data in 2024 shows the San Luis aquifer at its lowest recorded level in history.[10]
An important element of the Rye Resurgence Project is that it recognizes that switching to crops that require less water will only succeed if there is a market where farmers can sell those new crops at a profit. The project helps build a market for Colorado rye by investing significant effort and resources in marketing, branding materials, and personnel to develop relationships between the growers and the end users of rye such as brewers, distillers, millers, bakers, and consumers.[11] Building the market for San Luis Valley Resurgence Rye gives farmers an option to reduce their impact, earn a living wage, and support the local community. By keeping farmers farming, the future health of the community will be sustained.
II. Two Cautionary Tales to Avoid in the Future
The above two projects reflect effective strategies for managing water during this challenging time. There are, however, examples that have proven to be ineffective that are important to learn from. I will discuss two such cautionary case studies, highlighting some pitfalls of mismanaging water.
A. Alfalfa for Saudia Arabia
The growing of alfalfa in Arizona to ship to Saudi Arabia is perhaps the most glaring example of a project whose success comes at the expense of the community in which it occurs.[12] The short story of this project is that Saudi firms bought up 9 square miles of land in Arizona for irrigating and growing alfalfa grass.[13] The firms grew alfalfa in Arizona to export to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates because they had already drained their own aquifers.[14]
Alfalfa is an incredibly water-intensive crop. Growing it in a desert climate drastically impacts the surrounding communities. The Saudis were using the same amount of water to grow hay just for export as what a million people in the state use for water every year.[15] The Saudis invested a huge amount of water into the crop which they couldn’t grow at home because they don’t have the water. Essentially, this is exporting Arizona’s water.
By transporting the alfalfa overseas instead of selling it domestically, this also eliminated all future economic returns on that water. If that alfalfa stayed in Arizona, for example, it could have been sold to domestic cattle producers and benefited local communities and businesses. None of those domestic gains were achieved once the alfalfa left our shores.
Potential Water Delivery Routes. Since this water will be exported from the San Luis Valley, the water will be fully reusable. In addition to being a renewable water supply, this is an important component of the RWR water supply and delivery plan. Reuse allows first-use water to be used to extinction, which means that this water, after first use, can be reused multiple times. Graphic credit: Renewable Water Resources
B. Buy and Dry Schemes
In Colorado, we have seen before what is now labelled a “buy and dry” scheme. This scheme involves the sale of relatively all the water from a community, shipping it to a thirsty urban community and destroying a local agricultural economy. That is, in short, the tale of what happened in Crowley County.[16] As captured in Colorado’s Water Plan, it is an approach that we are committed to avoiding in the future.[17]
For an example of a buy and dry project now on the table, consider the case of the (improperly named) Renewable Water Resources. That project would buy out wells that are currently used to irrigate lands in the San Luis Valley and, rather than using that water for irrigation and farming, it would be piped to the front range for new suburban houses.[18] This has several direct and indirect negative economic impacts as well as cultural impacts on the San Luis Valley. This project makes one rural community suffer while a suburban community prospers.
In contrast to the Rye Resurgence Project, which invests in farmers to help them adapt to new markets, this project disregards farmers and eliminates the economic driver for their community. Proponents say the water is necessary to ensure other communities have enough water supply to secure their future. But we can’t let ourselves be tricked into believing that economic prosperity or managing our water resources is a zero-sum game.
Perkins County Canal Project Area. Credit: Nebraska Department of Natural Resources
C. Perkins County Canal
For another example of approaching our water management challenges as a zero-sum game, take the case of Nebraska’s proposed Perkins County Canal project. In a zero-sum game, there can be some winners, but at a high cost to others. In this case in particular, there will be many more losers and lots of wasted time and money. Rather than pursue such a costly path, we can find shared goals and interests and build solutions to help achieve those.
Under Nebraska’s plans, it will invest the time, money, and effort to build a canal to divert water in Colorado for use in Nebraska under the 1923 South Platte River Compact. If Nebraska does that, then Colorado water users will likely build countermeasures to offset impacts of the canal. Under this scenario, both Nebraska and Colorado would end up investing hundreds of millions of dollars, but almost all water users in each state would end up in a position that is no better than they were before Nebraska proposed the canal.
A better approach to the issue is one that recognizes that the agricultural economy and the communities it supports doesn’t observe state boundaries. The economy is regional. Farmers own land in both states. An individual farmer might buy supplies in Nebraska and farm in Colorado. And the reverse is likely true. Durable solutions need to benefit the region and not make the success contingent on the failure of the other. I will continue to do all I can to work towards such a solution.
See Article 7.
III. The Importance of the Rule of Law in Water Management
As we adapt to changing hydrology and look for flexible and collaborative solutions, it will also be important to stand firm on certain principles. Our success not only relies on our adaptability, but also on a solid foundation of laws that are consistently enforced with predictable results.
Colorado’s framework for managing water is based on state-level oversight and ultimate responsibility. This is bolstered by significant reliance on regional and local partnerships to facilitate solutions that are tailored to the water supply needs of local communities. The Colorado model prioritizes respect for and collaboration with regional bodies, such as water conservancy and conservation districts, with a norm of deferring to local expertise and solutions whenever possible. Nonetheless, the ultimate responsibility of managing Colorado’s water and ensuring compliance with compacts, laws, and regulations falls to the State. This is especially true when we talk about compliance with interstate water compacts.
Governor Clarence J. Morley signing Colorado River compact and South Platte River compact bills, Delph Carpenter standing center. Unidentified photographer. Date 1925. Print from Denver Post. From the CSU Water Archives
A. Interstate Compact Compliance
Compliance with Colorado’s nine interstate water compacts, two international treaties, and three equitable apportionment decrees is exclusively the responsibility of the State. This authority is established by the compact clause of the U.S Constitution that allows States, as sovereigns, to enter into agreements to apportion water between them to avoid conflicts over water.
Once ratified by Congress, interstate compacts become federal law. That does not mean, however, that the federal government controls state water resources. The power to control uses of water is an essential attribute of State sovereignty.[19] When states compact with each other to apportion the waters of interstate streams, those compacts also bind the federal government.[20] As we negotiate or litigate over our interstate compacts, I am dedicated to defending Colorado from federal overreach and protecting Colorado’s compact apportionments.
To the extent a state fails to comply with its interstate compact obligations, the State—and not individual water users, conservation or conservancy districts, or local governments—is held solely liable and responsible for complying or possibly paying damages out of the State’s General Fund.[21] In 2006, for example, the State was required to pay nearly $35 million in damages and legal costs to Kansas for violating the Arkansas River Compact.[22] When there is a challenge to State actions under the terms of these agreements, it is the State that is on the hook and local and regional entities are precluded from participating as parties to help defend the State in such litigation.[23] That is because interstate water disputes, reserved to the “original and exclusive jurisdiction” of the Supreme Court,[24] necessarily invoke States’ sovereignty, with each representing “the interests and rights of all of her people in a controversy with the other.”[25]
Elected officials in charge of managing Colorado’s water are accountable to taxpayers who, as noted above, will ultimately bear the cost of any failure to comply with interstate compacts. If the State manages water in a way in which constituents do not approve, they are able express their views directly to their elected officials or engage in the election process to have their voices heard. It is critical for the State to retain full authority to administer and distribute the waters of the State arising there to comply with interstate compacts as the sovereign with the exclusive authority to do so.
For a cautionary tale of how a state mismanaged its water consider what happened in Nebraska, when it faced an issue of how to manage its groundwater. In short, Nebraska delegated its regulatory authority over groundwater to local Natural Resource Districts instead of the state’s Department of Natural Resources.[26] Those local districts represented only the interests of their own water users, and they faced no direct liability for falling out of compact compliance. As a result, the districts failed to make the difficult policy and enforcement decisions necessary for Nebraska to comply with the compact, and Nebraska was forced to pay nearly $6 million in damages to Kansas after the U.S. Supreme Court found that Nebraska had violated the Republican River Compact.[27]
B. Developing Adaptable and Resilient Strategies for Colorado
Projects like the Maybell Diversion and Rye Resurgence are important to help individuals and communities adapt to variable water supplies. We will also need statewide strategies—and legal institutions—to allow those types of water users to occur while ensuring compliance with our interstate compact obligations. Together, we are well positioned to start a broader conversation on what adaptability and resilient strategies—and what legal tools—can help us achieve this critical goal.
Stakeholders have started to suggest different possible tools that can enable Colorado to better manage our water in an adaptive and resilient manner. One suggested strategy is to create a statewide conservation program that compensates people who forego use of their water rights, particularly at times of great demands on a particular system. The Rio Grande Conservation District is implementing such a system to protect its groundwater resources, for example.[28]
A second concept that some have suggested is to create a strategic reserve of water that Colorado could release to protect its water users from mandatory curtailments that might otherwise result from a shortage of water to downstream states. Under this model, the state would acquire and manage “slack capacity,” putting the state in position to navigate shortages and times when there is more demand for water than available.
Whatever strategies are ultimately developed, they are sure to be more successful if they can be built and tested before we need them. Given the pressures we are seeing on multiple fronts, the time to develop and test such ideas is now. As we know from lessons from other countries, the stakes are high and adopting an imperfect system can give rise to most unfortunate consequences.[29]
* * *
Our ability to adapt to the scarcity of water in Colorado and reduce uncertainty and unpredictability is critical to ensuring a promising future for our state. As I have explained, the best and most durable solutions will go beyond individual success and will collaborate with other interests to find win-win solutions like the Maybell Diversion and Rye Resurgence Projects. As we adapt to changing hydrology and look for flexible and collaborative solutions, it is also imperative to ground solutions in the rule of law and an admirable system. This is a formidable challenge, but one we can undoubtedly meet in the native land of hope.
[19] Tarrant Regional Water Dist. v. Herrmann, 569 U.S. 614, 631 (2013).
[20] Texas v. New Mexico, 602 U.S. 943, 962 (2024).
[21] Kansas v. Nebraska, 574 U.S. 445, 459 (2015) (finding local district boards bore no responsibility for complying with compact and assumed no share of the penalties Nebraska would pay for violations).
[22] Kansas v. Colorado, 533 U.S. 1, 20 (2001) (remanding the case to the Special Master for a determination of damages); Fifth and Final Report of Arthur L. Littleworth, Special Master, at 3, Kansas v. Colorado, No. 105 Orig., vol. II (Jan. 31, 2008).
[23] Texas v. New Mexico, 583 U.S. 913 (2017) (denying motions to intervene by local water districts in compact dispute between states).
[25] Wyoming v. Colorado, 286 U.S. 494, 508-09 (1932); New Jersey v. New York, 345 U.S. 369, 372 (1953); see also South Carolina v. North Carolina, 558 U.S. 256, 267 (1953) (“In its sovereign capacity, a State represents the interests of its citizens in an original action, the disposition of which binds the citizens.”); Nebraska v. Wyoming, 515 U.S. 1, 21 (1995) (“A State is presumed to speak in the best interests of [its] citizens. . . .”).
[26] Neb. Rev. Stat. Ann. § 46-702 (“The Legislature also finds that natural resources districts have the legal authority to regulate certain activities and, except as otherwise specifically provided by statute, as local entities are the preferred regulators of activities which may contribute to ground water depletion.”).
Fort Morgan has never fully owned its water supplies. The small farm town on the Eastern Plains has always leased its water from whomever had some to spare.
But with the late February settlement of a lawsuit that will allow construction of the $2 billion Northern Integrated Supply Project, or NISP, to move forward, Fort Morgan’s 10,564 residents will rest easier, knowing that for the first time, they will own the water that flows from their taps, according to City Manager Brent Nation.
“It has been our intention all along to own our water,” Nation said. “With this settlement, we can finally move forward. It’s a good thing for us.”
Fifteen water districts and cities in northern Colorado have banded together to build the massive project, which will take water from the Cache la Poudre River and create two dams and reservoirs and a sprawling pipeline system.
Participants include Fort Collins-Loveland Water District, Erie, Fort Morgan, Left Hand Water District, Central Weld County Water District, Windsor, Frederick, Lafayette, Morgan County Quality Water District, Firestone, Dacono, Evans, Fort Lupton, Severance and Eaton.
The Northern Integrated Supply Project, currently estimated at $2 billion, would create two new reservoirs and a system of pipelines to capture more drinking water for 15 community water suppliers. Credit: Northern Water
When completed, sometime after 2030, according to Northern Water, which is NISP’s sponsor, it will deliver 40,000 acre-feet of water annually to some 80,000 families. One acre-foot equals nearly 326,000 gallons, enough to serve two to four urban households each year.
But before then, and for years to come, the settlement will begin reshaping and restoring the Poudre.
Why the fuss?
Concern over the river has been rising for years.
According to Save the Poudre, nearly 400,000 acre-feet of water flow out of Poudre Canyon, but some 300,000 acre-feet are taken out by farmers and others almost immediately, leaving the river shallow, stressed and over heated as it flows more than 100 miles to its confluence with the South Platte River east of Greeley.
According to the settlement agreement, the $100 million will pay to move water diversion points farther downstream, leaving more water in the river as it flows east, rather than taking the water out higher up and reducing its flows.
Water-sharing arrangements between cities and farmers will be written to enhance recreation and stream improvements. New fish and boat passages will be installed around existing dams on the river. A new network to track the health of the river, its temperature and water quality, will also be added…
New dams and reservoirs must go through extensive permitting and environmental reviews to win approval from federal and state regulators. It took NISP about 15 years to win its final permit. That permit already includes requirements that will help the river, according to Northern spokesperson Jeff Stahla.
Under the federal permit, for instance, one-third of the total water delivered by the project must be delivered at specific volumes to boost stream flows in the winter and in the summer to aid fish and cool water temperatures, Stahla said.
Help delivered through the new settlement will come in addition to the federal and state requirements.
“It’s going to make a significant difference to the Poudre,” Northern Water General Manager Brad Wind said.
The settlement has also taken a lot of the heat out of the rooms where water planners and environmentalists…fought for more than a decade…
Dan Luecke is a well-known hydrologist and environmentalist who led the successful fight to stop Two Forks dam southwest of Denver in the 1980s. That too was a long, tortured battle, which largely ended when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with backing from the White House, rejected the proposal in 1990. There was no financial settlement then, Luecke said. But the $100 million Poudre agreement, though not as large as others in the American West, such as the $450 million Klamath River settlement, is noteworthy.
“$100 million is a pretty substantial number. It’s impressive in my mind,” Luecke said. “And the complexity of it, that they have to pump water in these reservoirs and use long pipelines to get the water back out to the urban areas. … It’s monumental.” (Luecke is a board member of Water Education Colorado, which founded Fresh Water News.)
The Fort Collins-Loveland Water District, which serves parts of both cities, is the largest participant in the NISP project, and will pay hundreds of millions of dollars for its share of the project and the settlement. And that’s OK with Stephen Smith, a member of the district’s board.
The Fort Collins-Loveland Water District, which serves parts of both cities, is the largest participant in the NISP project, and will pay hundreds of millions of dollars for its share of the project and the settlement. And that’s OK with Stephen Smith, a member of the district’s board.
“I feel comfortable with that,” Smith said, adding that he was speaking as a private individual, not a board member. “This money is going to go into the Poudre. If the money were going to buy off Save The Poudre, that would be a negative to me, but to have this six-member committee and to have an opportunity to put $100 million into the river, I consider that to be outstanding, I couldn’t be happier.”
Mid-February’s weeklong series of storms that dropped 4-to-5 feet of snow in areas of Denver Water’s collection area could be termed a “Sweetheart Surprise,” followed by a dumping of “Presidents Day Powder” that just kept going.
“It was an impressive week of snow with a bullseye right on our collection area,” said Nathan Elder, Denver Water’s manager of water supply. “After a couple dry weeks to start out the year, it was nice to see stormy winter weather return to the mountains.”
Elder said mountain snowpack in the parts of the South Platte and Colorado River basins where Denver Water collects its water jumped significantly due to the storms.
From Feb. 14-21, snowpack in the Upper South Platte River Basin climbed from 84% of normal up to 108%. During the same time period in the Upper Colorado River Basin, the snowpack jumped from 105% of normal up to 120%.
Snow piles up along the banks of Tenmile Creek near Copper Mountain in Summit County on Feb. 19. The creek is one of the main tributaries of Denver Water’s Dillon Reservoir. Photo credit: Denver Water.
However you look at it, all the snow in the second half of February has been great news for our water supply. And there’s an interesting trend happening during the 2024-25 snow season in Colorado: The major storms keep hitting on the holidays.
The February storm cycle started just in time for Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, continued dumping through Presidents Day, Feb. 17, and then another storm delivered a bonus round of snow Feb. 20-21.
The snow is good news for Denver Water, which relies on mountain snow to supply water to 1.5 million people in the metro area.
Just take a look at the snow totals from the weeklong series of storms that spanned Feb. 14-21, as reported by the ski resorts located in Denver Water’s collection area:
Arapahoe Basin: 43”
Breckenridge: 47”
Copper Mountain: 45”
Keystone: 47”
Winter Park: 62”
A snowboarder enjoys fresh powder at Winter Park in Grand County. The ski resort reported 62” of snow between Feb. 14-21. Photo credit: Winter Park Ski Resort.
It’s been a great winter so far at Winter Park and Copper Mountain, which have seen 257” and 255” of snow respectively as of Feb. 21, making them the two snowiest ski resorts in the state.
Snowpack is a measurement of the amount of water in the snow if it were to melt. In general, about 10 inches of snow melts down to around 1 inch of water here in Colorado.
Elder said what’s been interesting this year is that the majority of snow has fallen right around holidays starting after Halloween, then before Thanksgiving, between Christmas and New Years, and now between Valentine’s Day and Presidents Day.
“We can see the snowpack looks like steps on our charts around all these holidays,” Elder said. “With the recent storms, we saw basically an entire month’s worth of snow in seven days.”
Elder said that having the snowpack above 100% heading into March is a good sign for our water supply in the coming year.
The Fraser River at the bottom of Berthoud Pass is covered in snow. The river is part of the Colorado River Basin where Denver Water captures snow for its water supply. Photo credit: Denver Water.
“March and April are typically our snowiest months of the year in Colorado. Those two months usually provide about one-third of our annual snowpack. That’s because the snow that falls in those months has a higher water content than snow that falls in the beginning and middle of winter,” he said.
Denver Water’s total reservoir supply stands at 82% full as of Feb. 21, which is about average for this time of year. Remember that reservoir levels fall over the winter and then go back up in the spring when the snow melts.
As for what to expect for the rest of the ski season, maybe consider heading to the hills on St. Patrick’s Day or Easter, and who knows possibly even Mother’s Day in May!
An artist’s rendering shows what Glade Reservoir, a key component of the Northern Integrated Supply Project would look like after construction. The project is going ahead after Northern Water agreed to settle a lawsuit by Save the Poudre for $100 million.
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
March 5, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of water in the West, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
A massive new reservoir project in Northern Colorado is closer to reality after its architects settled a lawsuit with an environmental group seeking to block construction. The Northern Integrated Supply Project, or NISP, will go ahead sooner than expected after a lawsuit settlement. Northern Water will pay $100 million into a trust after Save the Poudre, a nonprofit, agreed to drop its lawsuit. That money will fund river improvement projects.
The controversial water project, which will cost around $2 billion to build, has been tied up in planning and permitting for more than two decades. Advocates for the new reservoirs say it’s an important way to make sure fast-growing communities in Larimer and Weld counties have enough water for new homes and residents. Opponents worry it will take water out of a Cache la Poudre River that is already taxed by diversions for cities and farms.
…the settlement money will go into a new “Poudre River Improvement Fund.”
[…]
The fund can be used for “ecological, habitat, and recreational improvements,” including the potential creation of a “Poudre River Water Trail” from Gateway Park in Poudre Canyon to Eastman Park in Windsor. The fund will be managed by a six-person committee, three of whom will be appointed by Save the Poudre, and three by the NISP enterprise…
Proponents of the Northern Integrated Supply Project say it will help fast-growing communities along the northern Front Range keep pace with the volume of new residents. (From Northern Water project pages)
NISP would supply 15 different water providers along the northern Front Range through two reservoirs and a system of pipelines and pumps. Northern Water, the agency that would build and operate NISP, projects that it will provide water to nearly 500,000 people by 2050.
Water from the system would flow to a diverse group of towns and cities north of Denver. Small, fast-growing towns such as Erie and Windsor stand to receive some of the largest water allocations from NISP. The list also includes the Fort Collins Loveland Water District, the Left Hand Water District, which is just north of Boulder, and Fort Morgan on the eastern plains.
“These are communities that have identified the need for housing as something that will increase the quality of life,” said Jeff Stahla, a spokesman for Northern Water. “So this is an important time for us as residents to realize that we can help to solve some of the problems and some of the the challenges that we’re seeing out there on the horizon as more people choose to live here.”
Stahla said construction is expected to take off in 2026, with some pipes being laid in the summer and fall of this year. If Save the Poudre’s lawsuit was still in place, he said, construction would have begun in “2027 or even beyond.” Glade Reservoir, the centerpiece of NISP’s water storage system, would flood a valley northwest of Fort Collins that is currently home to a stretch of U.S. Highway 287 connecting Fort Collins and Laramie, Wyo. That section of road would be rebuilt further East.
Kids play in the Poudre River Whitewater Park near downtown Fort Collins on Oct. 20, 2023. The Cache la Poudre is often referred to as a “working river” because it carries a large volume of water from manmade reservoirs to cities and farms far from its banks. Photo credit: Alex Hager/KUNC
Stahla said Northern Water’s permit includes requirements to mitigate environmental impacts caused by the new reservoirs. He alluded to the fact that the river is already connected to a number of large reservoirs and its water is piped and pumped far away from its original course.
“The Poudre River has really been a working river for 150 years now,” he said. “What NISP is planning to do certainly is not the only impacts to the river that have been occurring or will occur.”
…Stahla…suggested work on diversion structures, which redirect the river’s water towards farms and water treatment plants. Stahla suggested they could be modernized… and moved further downstream to allow more water to flow through certain sections of the river.
The South Platte River Basin is shaded in yellow. Source: Tom Cech, One World One Water Center, Metropolitan State University of Denver.
The Northern Integrated Supply Project, currently estimated at $2 billion, would create two new reservoirs and a system of pipelines to capture more drinking water for 15 community water suppliers. Credit: Northern Water
Here’s the release from email from Jeff Stahla at Northern Water:
February 28, 2025
BERTHOUD, Colorado – Northern Water, on behalf of the Northern Integrated Supply Project (NISP) Water Activity Enterprise, and the nonprofit group Save the Poudre have reached a settlement to the lawsuit challenging the federal permit issued for NISP, clearing the way for the construction of the vital water supply project in Northeastern Colorado.
The agreement, signed late on Friday, Feb. 28, by the Northern Water Board of Directors, outlines the creation of a new and long-term funding source for additional investments to benefit the reach of the Poudre River from the mouth of the Poudre Canyon to the river’s confluence with the South Platte River near Greeley. Throughout the next two decades, $100 million will be contributed by project participants to create a fund likely at the NoCo Foundation, or similar type foundation, with the intention of the money to be made available for projects and initiatives that improve the river for recreational uses, wildlife, water quality and more.
The agreement includes dismissal of the legal challenge to the federal Section 404 Clean Water Act permit issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in January 2023. Northern Water received the permit after two decades of work showing the need for the project. The mitigation requirements in the permit will remain, with the settlement funding adding projects beyond those outlined in the various permit documents issued for the project.
“This is a milestone day for the communities participating in the project,” said Northern Water General Manager Brad Wind. “The settlement agreement will close the permitting process for the project, open the door to constructing a project that will deliver much-needed water supplies to vibrant communities, and allow for dozens of large-scale riverine investments in and along the Poudre River.”
NISP’s Program Manager, Carl Brouwer, added, “This added investment to the river will complement the mitigation and enhancements identified by the involved permitting agencies.”
When complete, the project will include Glade Reservoir northwest of Fort Collins, a forebay and pump plant below the Glade Reservoir dam, Galeton Reservoir northeast of Greeley, 50 miles of buried pipelines to convey water to project participants, four additional pump plants, improved diversions on the Poudre River to allow fish passage and a requirement to convey 30 percent of the NISP water downstream for added benefit to the Poudre River. A section of U.S. Highway 287 will be rerouted around Glade Reservoir at the expense of project participants. Engineers estimate the project will cost $2 billion, with full buildout producing an annual yield of 40,000 acre-feet.
Construction of a fish passage at Watson Lake northwest of Fort Collins and a wetlands area at Eastman Park in Windsor has already occurred. Work on the remaining pipeline segments, the relocation of U.S. Highway 287 and the Glade Reservoir dam is projected to begin in 2026, with construction at Galeton Reservoir occurring after the completion of Glade Reservoir.
NISP includes participating communities and water providers large and small. The 15 participants include Fort Collins-Loveland Water District, Erie, Fort Morgan, Left Hand Water District, Central Weld County Water District, Windsor, Frederick, Lafayette, Morgan County Quality Water District, Firestone, Dacono, Evans, Fort Lupton, Severance and Eaton.
Water storage such as NISP is identified in the Colorado Water Plan as a necessary component for Colorado’s long-term water future. It joins water conservation, land use planning and other solutions to meet future water needs in Colorado.
About Northern Water
Northern Water, a public agency created in 1937, provides water for food production and municipal, domestic and industrial uses for more than 1 million people in Northeastern Colorado via the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, Pleasant Valley Pipeline and Southern Water Supply Project. Northern Water also generates hydropower at two sites and provides water quality services throughout the region. Its Municipal Subdistrict delivers water through the Windy Gap Project.
Through the building of two new reservoirs in Northern Colorado, the Northern Integrated Supply Project will supply 15 Northern Front Range water providers with 40,000 acre-feet of new, reliable water supplies. Aside from needed water storage, the project will incorporate an array of environmental and wildlife mitigation aspects and bring additional recreation opportunities to the region. Learn more at www.NISPwater.org.
Chances are when you’ve watched your favorite weather person on the local news you may have seen them put up a map of Colorado that shows the statewide snowpack.
If you’re a curious person you may wonder: Why do they show the map? What is snowpack? And where do they get all that information?
We’re here to help answer these questions.
First off, snowpack is the amount of water stored in the snow that blankets the mountains across our state. It’s important to measure the snowpack because the snow is where Colorado gets about 80% of its water supply for household and agricultural uses.
So now to answer the final question: Where does information about the snowpack come from? The data comes from SNOTELs.
OK, so what’s a SNOTEL?
Well, SNOTEL is short for “snow telemetry.” Think of it as just a fancy way of describing an automated weather station in a remote location that beams information back to a database.
9News meteorologist Cory Reppenhagen talks about the statewide snowpack during an evening weathercast. Image credit: 9News.
“In Colorado, we have 117 SNOTEL sites, and there are over 900 sites across 13 western states,” said Brian Domonkos, a hydrologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. “These sites have been around since the late 1970s and provide critical information about the amount of water in the snowpack.”
SNOTELs use “snow pillows” to measure the water content.
Snow pillows are rubber bladders on the ground that are filled with water and ethanol (to prevent the water from freezing). The pillow then weighs the snow, like when you stand on a scale to get your weight.
This SNOTEL site is located on the top of Berthoud Pass in Grand County. The snow pillow is covered in snow in front of the shed. Photo credit: Denver Water.
The pressure on the pillow pushes an equal amount of the antifreeze liquid into a measurement tube, which converts the weight of the water contained in the snow into inches of water content. This measurement is the snowpack, which is technically called the Snow Water Equivalent, and also known as SWE.
A sensor reads the SWE from the tube and sends the data to the NRCS’s central database.
The same SNOTEL site at Berthoud Pass in the summer shows the gray snow pillows located in front of the shed. Photo credit: Natural Resources Conservation Service.
“Generally speaking, here in Colorado, 10 inches of snow melted down equals roughly about 1 inch of water,” Domonkos said. “The data is used to predict how much water will flow into rivers and streams when the snow melts in the spring.”
The information from the SNOTELs is used by farmers, ranchers, water utilities, environmental groups and recreationists. Communities also use the information to be aware of the potential for flooding during the spring runoff.
There are 16 SNOTELs in Denver Water’s collection area that are viewed daily by the utility’s water planning team.
“The SNOTEL network is the most important source of information we have to manage our water supply, and I honestly can’t image how we’d get by without them,” said Nathan Elder, Denver Water’s manager of water supply.
This chart uses SNOTEL data to determine the Snow Water Equivalent in the area of the Colorado River Basin where Denver Water collects its water. Note the left side that shows the inches of water content in the basin. Image credit: Denver Water.
This map shows the 16 SNOTEL sites located in areas where Denver Water collects water for 1.5 million people in the metro area. Image credit: Natural Resources Conservation Service.
Elder’s team uses the data to make informed decisions about reservoir management and whether any water restrictions for Denver Water customers may be needed in addition to the regular summer watering rules.
Denver Water also monitors 115 SNOTEL sites upstream of Lake Powell to keep an eye on conditions in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Denver Water collects half of its water supply from rivers and streams that feed into the Colorado River.
“We use the SNOTEL data to provide insight into potential water rights calls that may impact our operations,” Elder said. “The earlier we have information, the better decisions we can make with our water supply.”
Denver Water also relies on manual snowpack readings collected on snow courses and from data collected in the spring from an Airborne Snow Observatory. Learn about these methods in this TAP story.
This map shows snowpack information collected from SNOTEL sites in river basins across the western U.S. Image credit: National Resources Conservation Service.
Domonkos said the SNOTELs are also critical in monitoring long-term weather trends across the western U.S.
“When you’re watching the news, you’ll see the various river basins showing a certain percent of the normal amount of snowpack for that date,” Domonkos said. “We always like to see the snowpack in the 100% to 120% range so it’s not too high that could lead to flooding and not too low that could lead to water shortages.”
Along with measuring the snowpack, the SNOTEL sites also measure all other forms of precipitation like rain, hail and ice. They also measure air temperature, soil moisture and soil temperature.
Brian Domonkos checks out weather data at the Berthoud Pass SNOTEL site in Grand County. Photo credit: Denver Water.
“These sites are very important for not only day-to-day weather information, but also for comparing snowpack year to year so we can keep track of any emerging trends,” Domonkos said.
All of the information is available for free on the NRCS website, which has a variety of data from each SNOTEL site. The information can be found on the NRCS website.
Here’s the release from the St. Vrain and Left Hand Water District (Jenny McCarty):
February 21, 2025
LONGMONT – Funding approved by Longmont’s voters in 2024 is enabling the St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District to leverage grants and other sources to provide $1.7 million this year to community partners working to address the most imminent water and watershed issues today. The funds will help mitigate wildfire risks, improve farm irrigation, save water by reducing non-functional turf grass, and enhance stream flows to benefit the environment.
In 2025, the District is partnering with and funding the Boulder Valley and Longmont Conservation Districts, Crocker Ditch, HFR Enterprises, Holland Ditch Company, Hover Park Home Owners Association (“HOA”), Town of Lyons, and The Watershed Center. 2025 marks the fourth year the District offered funding through their Partner Funding Program. Including $352,000 earmarked for 2025, the District has awarded 25 partners a total of $1.2 million, leveraging those dollars for more than $6.1 million since January 2022 (369%) toward improvements in water management within the St. Vrain watershed.
The St. Vrain Forest Health Partnership (“SVFHP”) includes 100+ partners including fire districts, agencies, towns and community members working to increase fire resilience to benefit communities, the forests and water quality. A portion of the District’s $352,000 will go to support the SVFHP’s outreach and education efforts. “We couldn’t accomplish this work without the District’s support and funding and are grateful to our community who voted for the ballot initiative,” said Yana Sorokin, Executive Director of The Watershed Center.
The Boulder Valley and Longmont Conservation Districts (“BVLCD”) are working alongside the SVFHP to develop forest management plans on private properties and conduct forest treatments to reduce risk of catastrophic wildfires. “These funds will help to reduce wildfire risk to life, property, and important surface waters within District boundaries,” explained Rob Walker, Director of BVLCD.
Boulder County Ditch and Reservoir map. Credit: The St. Vrain and Lefthand Water Conservancy District
The District is also partnering with Crocker Ditch, HFR Enterprises, and Holland Ditch Company to help improve local aging agriculture infrastructure and vegetation encroachment to support its future function.
Andy Pelster, Agriculture and Water Stewardship Sr. Manager for City of Boulder, which has ownership in Crocker Ditch, stated, “District funds will help improve water delivery efficiency and tracking.” Danna Ortiz, a representative of HFR Enterprises added, “This project gives us hope that the Knoth Reservoir may once again function, providing water for our ag neighbors and wildlife.” Larry Scripter, Vice President of the Holland Ditch Company said, “We wouldn’t be able to keep going with this work without the District’s financial support.”
Hover Park HOA is leading one of the first District-supported turf replacement projects in Longmont this year. In addition to funding support from other local agencies, Hover Park HOA is working to “replace over 8,200 square feet of thirsty turf grass with water-wise plants that support pollinators, look beautiful, and will create a more usable space for our community,” says Barbara Hau, resident representative for the HOA.
The Town of Lyons is using District funding to complete a preliminary analysis for managing stream flows on the St. Vrain Creek through Lyons for environmental benefit. Tracy Sanders, Lyons Flood Recovery Lead, said the District’s funds might “help determine whether environmental flows can improve creek conditions for temperature, and ultimately fish health.”
“These partnerships continue the District’s strong history of collaboration,” said Sean Cronin, Executive Director of the St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District. “Each project advances our goals the voters approved: to protect water quality, maintain healthy rivers and creeks, support local food production, and protect forests that are critical to our water supply,” he added.
About the St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District
The St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District (“District” and “SVLHWCD”), created in 1971, is your trusted local government working to safeguard water resources for all. The District’s work is founded in the Water Plan five pillars: protect water quality and drinking water sources, safeguard and conserve water supplies, grow local food, store water for dry years, and maintain healthy rivers and creeks. Aligned with the Water Plan, the District is pleased to promote local partner water protection and management strategies through the Partner Funding Program.
As a local government, non-profit agency formed at the request of our community under state laws, the District serves Longmont and the surrounding land area and basin that drains into both the St. Vrain and Left Hand Creeks. Learn more at http://www.svlh.gov.
If you have any questions about the District’s Partner Funding Program, please contact Watershed Program Manager at: jenny.mccarty@svlh.gov or 303.772.4060.
More than a year after an environmental group sued to stop a $2 billion northern Colorado water project, whispers of a settlement are being heard as the case winds its way through U.S. District Court in Denver.
Last January, Save The Poudre sued to block the Northern Integrated Supply Project, a two-reservoir development designed to serve tens of thousands of people in northern Colorado. The suit alleged that the Army Corps of Engineers had not adequately weighed the environmental impacts and less harmful ecological alternatives to the project…
Colorado-Big Thompson Project map. Courtesy of Northern Water.
Northern Water, which operates the federally owned Colorado-Big Thompson Project for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, is overseeing the permitting and construction of NISP. The agency also declined to comment on any potential settlement. Northern Water serves more than 1 million Front Range residents and hundreds of growers in the South Platte River Basin.
“We’re still moving forward with what we need to do on the litigation,” Northern spokesman Jeff Stahla said.
Northern Water’s board discussed the litigation in a confidential executive session last week at a study retreat and it is scheduled to discuss it in another private executive session Feb. 13 at its formal board meeting, according to the agenda.
Sources told Fresh Water News and The Colorado Sun that those discussions are related to the potential multimillion-dollar settlement.
Key developments this past year
In October, a federal judge delivered a favorable ruling to Wockner’s Save the Colorado on a case involving Denver Water’s Gross Reservoir expansion project. Now [envisonmental groups] are seeking an injunction to force Denver Water to stop construction of the dam, which began in 2022.
Workers from Denver Water and contractor Kiewit Barnard stand in front of Gross Dam in May to mark the start of the dam raise process. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Raising the Boulder County dam by 131 feet will allow Denver Water to capture more water from the headwaters of the Upper Colorado River on the Western Slope. In its ruling, the federal court said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had failed to consider the impact of climate change on the flows in the Colorado River.
What impact that ruling may have on the NISP case isn’t clear, but [the environmental group that sued Denver Water] said they believe it will give his organization more leverage to push for changes in NISP.
In addition, the City of Fort Collins has dropped its formal opposition to NISP. And Stahla said Northern has continued to push forward with key parts of the development, including the design work needed to relocate a 7-mile stretch of U.S. 287 northwest of Fort Collins.
Fort Collins Mayor Jeni Arndt said the city changed its stance because most of its environmental concerns had been met through the 21-year federal permitting process.
“The EPA had signed off, and the Corps of Engineers had signed off,” she said. “It was obvious that this was not going to be another Two Forks,” referring to a massive dam proposed in the 1970s by Denver Water on the South Platte River near Deckers. It was rejected by the EPA due to environmental concerns.
Arndt said the city also planned to use a later review process, known as a 1041 review, to address other environmental concerns that might arise.
If NISP is ultimately built, and most believe it will be, it will provide water for 15 fast-growing communities and water districts along the Interstate 25 corridor, including the Fort Collins-Loveland Water District, Fort Morgan, Lafayette and Windsor.
The largest participant in the giant project is the Fort Collins-Loveland District. Board member Stephen Smith said he believes NISP will move forward one way or another and that it is critical to serving the water-short region.
“NISP is going to get built and it will provide water to Fort Collins by 2033,” he said.
The Northern Integrated Supply Project, currently estimated at $2 billion, would create two new reservoirs and a system of pipelines to capture more drinking water for 15 community water suppliers. An environmental group is now suing the Army Corps of Engineers over a key permit for Northern Water’s proposal. (Save the Poudre lawsuit, from Northern Water project pages)
Three of Colorado’s top water experts hammered home the idea that Colorado’s water situation id precarious, at best, and almost always on the brink of crisis. The day-long Voices of Rural Colorado symposium in Denver was the setting for an hour-long discussion of Colorado water. Attendees heard from, and interacted with, Rebecca Mitchell, former executive director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board and now Colorado’s representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission; Zane Kessler, director of government relations for the Colorado River District; and Jim Yahn, Logan County Commissioner and manager of the North Sterling Irrigation District. One of the points that was repeatedly made during the discussion was that the Colorado River is Colorado’s River. Besides watering most of the Western Slope of Colorado, the river is tapped for more than a half-million acre feet of water to the Front Range and eastern plains. Nearly half of that, about 200,000 acre feet per year, is fed directly into the Big Thompson River at Estes Park, primarily for irrigation in the South Platte River Basin. The remaining 330,000 acre feet is diverted to cities on the Front Range like Denver, Colorado Springs and Pueblo. That water ends up in the South Platte and Arkansas River basins…
Yahn told the attendees that continued drought in the Colorado River Basin will have an impact on the South Platte Valley, which is why projects like the Chimney Hollow Reservoir, nearing completion next to Carter Lake west of Berthoud, are important…Mitchell said that the crisis on the Colorado is easily seen in the water levels of the two largest reservoirs on the river, Lake Mead on the Nevada-Arizona state line near Las Vegas, and Lake Powell, halfway between Salt Lake City and Phoenix on the Utah-Arizona state line.
In 2024, the City of Fort Collins applied for a 1041 permit from Larimer County. As a part of the permit process, two public hearings will take place with the county’s Planning Commission and the Board of County Commissioners.
The meetings are scheduled at the Larimer County offices at 200 W. Oak St. in Fort Collins at the following times:
Planning Commission: February 19, 2025 at 6 p.m.
Board of County Commissioners: March 24, 2025 at 6:30 p.m.
The Planning Commission holds its hearing to provide a permit recommendation to the County Commissioners. The County Commissioners hold a hearing to make a final decision on the permit application.
The Halligan Project requires a 1041 permit from Larimer County because it includes the enlargement of a reservoir resulting in a surface area at high water line in excess of 50 acres. The permit process looks at all aspects of the project. To view the application, visit the county’s portal by clicking the button below.
Information Session on Larimer County Permit Application
As someone who is interested in the Halligan Water Supply Project, we are reaching out to inform you about recent developments. In 2024, the City of Fort Collins submitted an application for a 1041 permit from Larimer County. The City, acting through Fort Collins Utilities, is proceeding with this permitting process now as the project is moving through phases of design and closer to construction. The permit process looks at all aspects of the project. To view the application, visit the county’s website by clicking this link.
To increase awareness, the City is hosting an Information Sessionon Feb. 12, 2025 from 6-7:30 p.m. at the Livermore Community Hall. City staff will be on hand to highlight elements of the application and answer questions. While this won’t be part of the official public comment process with Larimer County, we encourage you to engage directly with us. To RSVP, click the button below. Light refreshments will be provided.
DENVER, CO – January 23, 2025 – The High Line Canal Conservancy announced today that Harriet Crittenden LaMair, the organization’s founding CEO, will step down after 11 years of visionary leadership. Harriet will remain in her role until mid-2025 to ensure a seamless transition as the Conservancy begins its next chapter.
“The preservation and protection of the High Line Canal have been my passion for the past 11 years,” said LaMair. “It has been an honor and joy to work with so many friends and partners to secure a vital future for the old Canal. Given the Canal safeguards that we have put in place, I am confident this is the right time to step away from leading the Conservancy. Together with Denver Water, local governments and private support, we have permanently protected the Canal under a conservation easement, improved community access and safety and established a strong stewardship endowment, forever ensuring improved care along all 71 miles,” said LaMair.
LaMair’s impact is significant, having spearheaded the creation of the High Line Canal Conservancy in 2014, transforming it from a startup nonprofit into a trusted regional leader. Under LaMair’s leadership, the Conservancy has achieved historic milestones: securing over $33 million in private investment matched by public funds for more than $100 million in Canal improvements, establishing a Canal Collaborative that unites 14 jurisdictions, launching impactful community programs and protecting the Canal with a conservation easement.
High Line hero in action! Harriet Crittenden LaMair rallies the team and community to protect and celebrate the 71-mile treasure during an event along the trail in Aurora. Photo by Evan Semón Photography
“Harriet has been a trusted leader and champion for the Canal over the years and has set us up for success,” said Arapahoe County Commissioner Carrie Warren-Gully. “We would not be where we are today without her tenacity, vision and commitment to the long-term protection and stewardship of the Canal. She is leaving a lasting legacy and big shoes to fill — and a collective awareness that we all have a responsibility to care for this regional treasure now and forever.”
LaMair’s contributions have garnered regional and national acclaim, including the 2017 Jane Silverman Ries Award and the 2022 Denver Regional Council of Governments Metro Vision Award.
“Harriet’s leadership has been nothing short of transformative, shaping the High Line Canal Conservancy into a trusted and respected regional leader,” said Alan Salazar, CEO of Denver Water. “Her unwavering passion for the natural world and her exceptional ability to bring people together have united communities and organizations around a shared vision for the Canal’s future. Denver Water is proud to have partnered with Harriet and the Conservancy in this remarkable journey, and her legacy will undoubtedly inspire continued stewardship and collaboration for generations to come.”
Paula Herzmark, Chair of the High Line Canal Conservancy Board, credited LaMair with being the driving force behind the Conservancy’s success: “Through her vision and determination, she not only built an organization but also inspired a regional movement that will benefit communities for generations. We owe her an incredible debt of gratitude for her leadership and passion for this remarkable resource.”
As the Conservancy moves forward, it remains steadfast in its mission to preserve and enhance the 71-mile High Line Canal. Over the next three years, the organization will implement more than 30 improvement projects, expand community programs and advance natural resource management initiatives. Herzmark reiterated the Board’s commitment to building on LaMair’s legacy, stating, “As Harriet transitions from her role, we remain committed to carrying forward the legacy she created.”
The Conservancy’s Board is actively preparing for this leadership transition and is committed to identifying a new CEO who will continue advancing the Conservancy’s mission and vision. More information about the job posting will be shared in the coming weeks. In the meantime, interested parties can contact employment@highlinecanal.org for inquiries.
About the High Line Canal Conservancy The High Line Canal Conservancy is a nonprofit dedicated to preserving, protecting and enhancing the 71-mile High Line Canal. Since its founding in 2014, the Conservancy has led a regional effort to ensure the Canal remains a vibrant and enduring resource. Learn more at HighLineCanal.org.
The High Line Canal Collaborative celebrates a historic moment, marking the land transfer of a portion of the Canal from Denver Water to Arapahoe County. Left to Right: Harriet Crittenden LaMair (High Line Canal Conservancy), Paula Herzmark (High Line Canal Conservancy Board of Directors), Dessa Bokides (High Line Canal Conservancy Board of Directors), Amy Heidema (Denver Water), Mark Bernstein (Denver Parks and Recreation), Diana Romero Campbell (Denver City Council), Tom Roode (Denver Water), Alan Salazar (Denver Water), Jim Lochhead (High Line Canal Conservancy Board of Directors), Steve Coffin (High Line Canal Conservancy Board of Directors), Laura Kroeger (Mile High Flood District), Lora Thomas (Douglas County Commission), Evan Ela (High Line Canal Conservancy Board of Directors), Melissa Reese-Thacker (South Suburban Parks and Recreation), Dan Olsen (Southeast Metro Stormwater Authority), Pam Eller (South Suburban Parks and Recreation Board of Directors), Earl Hoellen (Cherry Hills Village City Council), Jeff Baker (Arapahoe County Commission), Leslie Summey (Arapahoe County Commission), Shannon Carter (Retired – Arapahoe County Open Spaces), Bill Holen (Arapahoe County Commission), Carrie Warren-Gully (Arapahoe County Commission), Gretchen Rydin (Littleton City Council), Gini Pingenot (Arapahoe County Open Spaces), Amy Wiedeman (City of Centennial), Suzanne Moore (City of Greenwood Village), Brian Green (Aurora Parks, Recreation and Open Space), Nicole Ankeney (Aurora Parks, Recreation and Open Space). Photo by Evan Semón Photography
Lafayette, CO — Today, House Assistant Minority Leader Joe Neguse, Co-Chair of the Colorado River Caucus, announced $2.4 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for two projects in Colorado’s 2nd District aimed at restoring and improving the ecological conditions of local waterways and aquatic habitat near the communities of Granby and Boulder. These investments were allocated by the Bureau of Reclamation’s WaterSMART Environmental Water Resources Projects program.
“Local communities are instrumental in protecting and restoring Colorado’s rivers and streams. This important funding will support locally driven projects that enhance watershed health and resiliency, restore ecological conditions, and embody the spirit of ecological stewardship,” said Assistant Leader Neguse.
“Colorado is focused on protecting our vital water sources so that there is plenty of clean water for our communities and environment. I applaud Rep. Neguse’s leadership in Congress to pass federal legislation that is delivering for Colorado, and thank our State agencies and Coloradans carrying out these important projects,” said Governor Jared Polis.
Projects in Colorado’s 2nd Congressional District include the Upper Colorado River Ecosystem Enhancement Project, managed by the Grand County Learning By Doing Cooperative Effort (LBD), and the Boulder Creek Headwaters Resiliency Project, led by the Boulder Watershed Collective. Additional information on both can be found HERE and below:
$1,425,859 for the Upper Colorado River Ecosystem Enhancement Project, to restore two stream reaches on the Fraser River and Willow Creek near the community of Granby.
$954,204 for the Boulder Creek Headwaters Resiliency Project, to restore and improve the ecological condition of 181 acres of degraded aquatic and riparian habitat, and 2.8 miles of wet meadow streams throughout the Boulder Creek Watershed near Boulder.
“This is just another great example of the successful collaboration taking place in Grand County across a wide range of stakeholders that is resulting in very tangible improvements in the ecological health of the Colorado River headwaters,” according to a statement from the Grand County Learning By Doing Management Committee.
“The projects selected are working through a collaborative process to achieve nature-based solutions for the health of our watersheds and river ecosystems to increase drought resiliency,” said Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton. “This historic investment from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law gives Reclamation the opportunity to continue to collaborate with our stakeholders to leverage funds for these multi-benefit projects.”
“Denver Water is proud to support ongoing stream improvement projects like those to be funded in this latest round of federal funding. Congratulations to Grand County Learning by Doing on this award. We look forward to working with our partners on the upcoming restoration work to Willow Creek and the Fraser River to benefit the Colorado River Basin,” said Rick Marsicek, Chief of Water Resource Strategy at Denver Water.
As co-founder and Co-Chair of the Congressional Colorado River Caucus, Neguse has brought together a bipartisan mix of lawmakers each representing a state along the Colorado River Basin. The group is working to build consensus on critical issues plaguing the river and support the work of the Colorado River Basin states on how best to address the worsening levels of drought in the Colorado River Basin.
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Patricia J. Rettig):
December 2, 2024
Imagine a best-selling, 900-page novel using “a sad, bewildered nothing of a river” as its centerpiece, connecting the earth’s geologic origin and dinosaur age to 1970s rural Colorado.
Now imagine that novel becoming a touchstone for its times, yet still relevant today, as our nation approaches its 250th anniversary. The book is James A. Michener’s Centennial, an unlikely novel published a half-century ago. By creating a microcosm of the country, he explained America to itself in anticipation of the 1976 bicentennial.
That the Pulitzer-prize winning Michener chose as his landscape the West—and the little-known South Platte River on Colorado’s northeastern plains—is surprising only in that this was his first epic novel related to the U.S. mainland.
But ever since he briefly lived in Greeley, Colorado, in the late 1930s before his writing career began, the winding South Platte River stuck with him. As a young college professor, Michener recognized the wealth of stories resulting from the hardships of people surviving in an arid area.
After Michener’s service on a national bicentennial committee left him frustrated, he decided to return to the Centennial State, Colorado, which gained statehood in 1876. He hoped to tell a tale of the American experience, and in the opening chapter a character states, “If we can make the Platte comprehensible to Americans, we can inspire them with the meaning of this continent.”
Forgoing stereotypical Western stories of railroad builders and farmers’ daughters, Michener fictionalized selected histories of settlement and created relatable characters.
South Platte at 52 bridge image by Laura Perry, courtesy USGS.
Native Americans, French trappers, Mennonite settlers, farmers of German-Russian descent, English ranchers, Mexican and Japanese laborers—all depended on the South Platte River and its tributaries in the dry, inhospitable land. They also had to depend on each other.
By starting with the land’s formation, Michener depicts every character as an immigrant. He estimates human arrival in the region at about 12,000 years ago, and those Indigenous peoples and their descendants remain present throughout the story. As more people arrived and society evolved, everyone built lives in relationship with the river.
For many, the river provided a pathway to the West. For a few, it revealed golden nuggets, though the real wealth was the water itself.
Yet what Michener presents as progress gradually becomes recognized as unsustainable. The memorable Potato Brumbaugh has not only the innovative idea of irrigating crops but also the radical concept of digging a tunnel under the Rocky Mountains to import water from west of the Continental Divide. When this source is not enough, groundwater pumping increases, with dire consequences.
Such innovation—water-related and otherwise—is important to understand today, but also significant is knowing the history of how communities got built. Michener also shows the conflicts that arose with each wave of newcomers bringing their own ideas about how to live.
He also demonstrates changing attitudes, including acceptance of racial differences and increasing dismay over environmental destruction. His story concludes in the early 1970s, referencing Watergate, international conflict and immigration. Characters face inflationary times and polluted air and water. They know they need to solve the coming water shortages.
Not much is different today.
The key difference is that as Michener’s characters decry the environmental damage caused by their ancestors and neighbors, they also recognize they need to know their history and honor their longstanding connections to the land and water.
This is what modern humanity has forgotten. Through the innovations of pipes, plumbing and chemical treatments, we have relegated our rivers to the background, as if they were merely an unending supply of water at our command. We have lost our connections to natural resources, to history, to each other.
Patricia Rettig, Associate Professor, Libraries, Colorado State University, March 29, 2022
As we now prepare for our 250th anniversary, Centennial, both the novel and the groundbreaking 26-hour television miniseries airing from 1978 to 1980, reminds us of the country’s strengths.
Nearly 900 pages in, a character skips a Colorado-Nebraska college football game to survey the South Platte by plane. As he nears the Nebraska state line, he says, “No one in Colorado will believe it, but this river is more exciting than football.”
Imagine if more people, in all states, felt the same way. Patricia J. Rettig is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She is the archivist for the Water Resources Archive at the Colorado State University Libraries
The South Platte River Basin is shaded in yellow. Source: Tom Cech, One World One Water Center, Metropolitan State University of Denver.
Douglas County is adding new homes like crazy. Some of its towns plan to double in size in the next 30 years, but these new homes use shockingly little water, blowing up traditional water planning rules and raising questions about how much water Colorado communities need to grow.
Sterling Ranch, for instance, has more than 10 years of data showing that the master-planned community of 3,400 residences just off Interstate 25 near Littleton uses just 0.18 acre-foot of water for each single family home, about 30% less than most urban homes, where 0.25 to 0.50 acre-foot per home is the norm. An acre-foot equals 326,000 gallons.
The community conserves by requiring water-wise lawns, using super-efficient showers and toilets, and installing separate meters for indoor and outdoor use. It also uses recycled water for its parks.
In response, Douglas County has allowed Sterling Ranch to adopt much lower water standards for the thousands more new homes it plans to build. The community will hold 12,500 homes when it is fully built.
Since 2013, Douglas County commissioners have twice allowed the community to dedicate less water to new homes, agreeing to a reduced standard of 0.40 acre-feet, from 0.75 in 2013 and to 0.24 in 2021. Next month, Sterling Ranch and its water district, Dominion Water and Sanitation, will ask the county for the authority to set the standards in the future as it sees fit, without county review, something that incorporated cities, such as Parker and Castle Rock do now.
Lindsay Rogers, a municipal water conservation analyst with Western Resource Advocates, said the lowering of water demand standards is welcome news.
“The new standard is a good approach,” she said, and very different from traditional planning efforts in Colorado, where cities routinely ask for much more water than is actually needed, placing higher demands on rivers and underground supplies and raising the cost of water service, a major contributor to higher home prices.
“We want to see counties, cities, and water providers setting a water dedication that is as closely aligned as possible with the water use on site,” she said.
“Sterling Ranch is a great example who has done this well, and has proven savings, and should be rewarded for its efforts,” she said.
More and more homes
Like other arid Western states being blistered by drought, warming temperatures, and lower stream flows, Colorado’s water future is not assured. The Colorado Water Plan predicts that the state could need up to 740,000 acre-feet of new water supplies by 2050 under the most dire planning scenarios, where the climate warms intensely and growth surges.
But if new homes can operate with 30% less water than they once did, would that lessen future shortages and provide the state some breathing room? Possibly.
But it’s not likely to do much, according to Kat Weismiller, acting head of the water supply planning section at the Colorado Water Conservation Board, because the scale of development is small.
“We look at a range of drivers, including social values, around water conservation and development to understand future water demands. While the new development at Sterling Ranch is innovative and sets an important example for how we can develop new communities in a water-efficient way, at this time, the scale of this type of development is fairly limited and it would be unlikely to meaningfully shift the way we forecast water needs at the state level or entirely close the gap,” she said.
Ultra-water-efficient homes
The trend toward ultra-water-efficient homes appears to be on an upward trajectory.
Another large Douglas County development under consideration, the Pine Canyon Ranch on Castle Rock’s border, asked for and has been given preliminary approval by the Douglas County Planning Commission to build 800 new homes and 1,000 townhomes and apartments with just 0.27 acre-feet of water per home.
Kurt Walker owns Pine Canyon Ranch. His family has been trying to annex into Castle Rock for 20 years. Tired of waiting for the city to act, the Walker family went to the county. Its plan calls for a sophisticated recycled water system and water-efficient homes.
The plan has drawn opposition from Castle Rock and others worried about the potential use of nonrenewable groundwater, and added traffic and congestion. If the land is annexed into Castle Rock — talks are underway again — the city would likely supply the water, bringing the ranch’s groundwater into its own water system, which uses a combination of surface water, recycled water and groundwater. Castle Rock requires new homes to come with 1.1 acre-feet of water.
Walker said he believes a deal will eventually be reached with Castle Rock. But he defends his family’s use of the nonrenewable groundwater it owns. In Colorado, landowners typically own rights to the water contained in the aquifers beneath their land.
“If I really wanted to maximize the amount of houses on my property, I would not have reduced the water standard to 0.27. … Our plan would leave about 50% of our groundwater rights in the ground, untouched,” Walker said. “If I was in this just to put as many houses on this property as I could, I would have taken everything out of the aquifer that I could. That could have added 600 or 700 houses onto what we proposed. But we didn’t do that.”
Water stored in Colorado’s Denver Basin aquifers, which extend from Greeley to Colorado Springs, and from Golden to the Eastern Plains near Limon, does not naturally recharge from rain and snow and is therefore carefully regulated. Courtesy U.S. Geological Survey.
A look into the past
There was plenty of that type of development in the 1970s as Douglas County began to boom. Developers tapped its groundwater repeatedly. The water was so pure, it needed little treatment. Other cities, such as Denver, brought water over mountains from miles away. But here, it could just be pulled up through a water well. This helped keep the cost of building homes low and lured developers who built Highlands Ranch, Parker and Castle Rock.
But those underground water supplies proved to be fragile. Some aquifers can be recharged from snowmelt and rain, but these, in the Denver Basin, are sealed in rock formations which recharge slowly. As pumping increased, the aquifers declined. Soon, wells began to fail and alarms began ringing.
The water picture today is much different. In 1985, state lawmakers forced well owners to limit their pumping by extracting just 1% of available water supplies each year, in the hope of extending the aquifers’ life for 100 years.
Now, though the Denver Basin aquifers continue to supply millions of gallons of water to Douglas County communities, the declines have slowed, and water districts and cities have moved to develop and use renewable surface supplies from rivers, and from recycled water plants.
And the county itself is much more concerned about future water supplies today. Though it does not own reservoirs and pipelines, it guides water use, as other counties do, by regulating how much water developers must bring to the table before they are approved to begin building.
This year it created its own Water Resources Commission and is creating a 25-year water plan. The county has been criticized for not creating a longer-term plan, say 100 or 300 years, as nearby counties have done. But County Commissioner George Teal said the 25-year plan is only a first-step.
“We plan on a 20-year horizon right now,” he said. “It doesn’t mean we won’t do a 100-year plan at some point.”
Some say it’s time to stop groundwater use entirely
Steve Boand, a former county commissioner and water consultant, has been monitoring the health of the county’s groundwater supplies for decades.
He supports lower water requirements for new homes, but he wants the county to go further and outlaw building solely with nonrenewable groundwater, something he acknowledges isn’t on the county’s political radar right now.
“It’s up to community planners to figure out what the right balance is — 0.5 is OK, if a house only needs 0.3, and 0.2 can be allocated to other uses, like park land,” Boand said. “We have to try these things to see if they will work.”
Western Resource Advocates’ Rogers says she’s encouraged by the data, at Sterling Ranch and elsewhere, that shows new homes can be built with much lower water profiles. That they are also likely to encourage more growth is real but less concerning, she said.
“It’s possible that these new standards will mean more homes,” she said. “But growth is happening, and it is going to continue whether it is in Douglas County or other places in Colorado. The fact that the growth is happening in places like Sterling Ranch, where they have all of these efficiencies in place, is a good thing.”
Fort Collins, Loveland, Timnath and Windsor residents who get their water from the Fort Collins-Loveland Water District will see a 30% increase or more in rates for 2025…Residents who reach higher tiers of water use and homeowners association accounts that go over allotments will be hit even harder if they don’t find ways to reduce. But after hearing from representatives of HOAs, the Fort Collins-Loveland Water District board backed off charging “irrigation customers” five times as much when they go over their allotments, which were assigned at the time their accounts were created but haven’t been enforced. Instead, this segment of ratepayers, which includes commercial customers and parks, will pay twice as much as the normal rate for overages…The board approved the rate increases for 2025 on Nov. 19…
Base fees for residential, commercial and irrigation customers are increasing 30%. On top of that, rates per 1,000 gallons of water are increasing 30% across all tiers for residential customers. The 30% rate increases also apply to the three or four developments in what is known as “The City of Fort Collins service area as defined by IGA.”
[…]
The water district is also introducing a new fourth tier for residential customers. The cost of water will be five times higher than the next closest tier — for extremely high water use that exceeds 50,000 gallons per month…
Fees for single-family development taps will increase anywhere from 19% to 31%.
Fees for multifamily development taps will increase 15%.
Fees for commercial development taps will increase 33%.
Arapahoe County has enough water to meet its needs through 2050, according to a new study, but major steps will need to be taken to reduce future demand and protect the county’s groundwater supplies.
Arapahoe County Commissioner Jeff Baker, in a statement, said the study is a cautionary tale, showing that while existing supplies generate 141,000 acre-feet of water each year, future growth could strain those supplies.
“If they want to build, they need to make sure there is enough water to provide adequate water resources to people. This is not a green light to develop,” Baker said.
Arapahoe County is home to 656,000 people, who use 83,400 acre-feet of water a year. By 2050, those numbers are expected to soar, with population topping 900,000 and water demand increasing to as much as 116,000 acre-feet a year, according to the new report.
Water stored in Colorado’s Denver Basin aquifers, which extend from Greeley to Colorado Springs, and from Golden to the Eastern Plains near Limon, does not naturally recharge from rain and snow and is therefore carefully regulated. Courtesy U.S. Geological Survey.
As with other counties, Arapahoe County does not deliver water, relying instead on 12 separate water districts and agencies to supply its communities, according to Anders Nelson, a spokesman for the county. Some of its supplies come from renewable surface water — primarily runoff from mountain snowpack — while the more rural parts of the county rely on groundwater.
The study outlines several steps that should be taken to protect the fast-growing community southeast of Denver from future water shortages. The county will require developers to document adequate water for new construction projects; implement county-wide water-efficient landscaping rules, and encourage regional partnerships and water sharing agreements.
More by Jerd SmithJerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
The twin turbines of Xcel Energy’s Shoshone hydroelectric power plant in Glenwood Canyon can generate 15 megawatts. The plant was down for about a year and a half, according to the Colorado Division of Water Resources. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
The Shoshone Hydropower Plant in Glenwood Canyon was not operating for nearly all of 2023 and more than half of 2024, adding urgency to a campaign seeking to secure the plant’s water rights for the Western Slope.
According to records from the Colorado Division of Water Resources, the Shoshone Hydropower Plant was not operating from Feb. 28, 2023 until Aug. 8, 2024. According to Michelle Aguayo, a spokesperson from Xcel Energy, the company that owns the plant, there was a rockfall which forced an outage as well as maintenance which impacted operations during that time period.
The Grizzly Creek Fire burning along the Colorado River on August 14, 2020. By White River National ForestU.S. Forest Service – Public Domain
In 2024 the plant has been down for 221 days; in 2023 for 307 days; in 2022 for 91 days and in 2021 for 143 days. Water Resources Division 5 Engineer James Heath said he began tracking Shoshone outages in 2021 when they began to happen more frequently, starting with the post-Grizzly Creek fire mudslides in Glenwood Canyon.
“It was all these extended outages and just being able to have some sort of record of what was going on,” Heath said. “I kept getting questions from the parties on how many days we were operating ShOP and what the priorities were on those different days.”
The recent extended outages of the plant increase the urgency of the effort by the Colorado River Water Conservation District to acquire Shoshone’s water rights, which are some of the oldest and most powerful non-consumptive rights on the main stem of the Colorado River. If the plant were to shut down permanently, it would threaten the Western Slope’s water supply. The water rights could be at risk of being abandoned or acquired by a Front Range entity.
At a tour of the Shoshone plant in October, hosted by the Water for Colorado Coalition, River District Director of Strategic Partnerships Amy Moyer explained why the Shoshone water rights are important for improving water security and climate resilience on the Western Slope.
“As we’re sitting here in the iconic Glenwood Canyon. … It is a beautiful place, but we have an active highway, a railroad, a hydro power plant, all nestled in this tiny canyon that has experienced its fair share of natural hazards and risks over the years,” Moyer said. “When we’re looking at the level of risk, that is why we are looking for permanent protections for these water rights, and why we have a willing partner in Xcel Energy realizing that they had an incredible asset that was meaningful to Colorado’s Western Slope and the Colorado River itself.”
Water runs down a spillway at the Shoshone hydro plant in Glenwood Canyon. Rockfalls, fires and mudslides in recent years have caused frequent shutdowns of plant operations. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
According to the terms of ShOP, when it is on during the summer, the plant can call 1,250 cfs. In the wintertime, that number falls to 900 cfs. The agreement is in place for 40 years (with 32 remaining), a relatively short period in water planning, after which it could be renegotiated. And ShOP doesn’t have the stronger, more permanent backing of a water court decree.
“ShOP came about as a band aid to kind of maintain the river flow and the river regime when the plant was out,” said Brendon Langenhuizen, River District director of technical advocacy. “ShOP wasn’t meant to be for year after year after year of the plant being down.”
The Shoshone hydro plant in Glenwood Canyon. The River District has made a deal with Xcel Energy to buy the water rights associated with the plant to keep water flowing on the Western Slope. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
The River District’s campaign to acquire the Shoshone water rights has been gaining momentum over the last year, with about $55 million in committed funding so far from entities across the Western Slope, the River District and the state of Colorado. The River District plans to apply for $40 million in funding from the U.S. Bureau Reclamation’s B2E funding. This money from the Inflation Reduction Act is earmarked for environmental drought mitigation.
The River District’s plan is to add an instream flow use to the water rights in addition to their current use for hydropower. That requires working with the Colorado Water Conservation Board, which is the only entity in the state allowed to hold instream flow rights which preserve the environment, as well as getting a new water court decree to allow the change in use.
That way, when the Shoshone plant is offline, the instream flow right would be activated to continue pulling water downstream, making ShOP obsolete and solidifying a critical water right for the Western Slope.
Xcel would lease the water right for hydropower from the River District for as long as the plant is in operation.
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the ‘hole’ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really don’t change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
“Colorado’s Western Slope is truly at an epicenter of increased temperatures and decreased streamflows that are exacerbating temperature issues, creating water quality issues,” Moyer said. “So it’s imperative that we look for these legacy level, permanent solutions to build resiliency in our basin.”
On October 14th, the Poudre Flows Project, a collaboration of Colorado Water Trust, the Colorado Water Conservation Board, Cache la Poudre Water Users Association, the cities of Fort Collins, Greeley, and Thornton, Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District, and Colorado Parks and Wildlife, began increasing flows in the Cache la Poudre River. During the week of October 14, Thornton added flows between the mouth of the Poudre River and the confluence with the South Platte.
The Poudre Flows Project aims to reconnect the Cache la Poudre River past numerous frequent dry-up locations between the mouth of the Poudre Canyon and the confluence with the South Platte River while still allowing water rights owners to use their water. Under a temporary plan approved by the State, water provided by the cities of Thornton and/or Greeley can be used in a trial run of the innovative Poudre Flows Project. As conditions allow, the temporary plan allows water provided by Thornton to be used to increase flows by up to 20 cubic feet per second (“cfs”) for up to two weeks this fall and again in the spring. As conditions allow, the plan will also allow water provided by Greeley to be used to increase flows between 3-5 cfs between the months of April to October.
“The Poudre Flows project has brought a cross section of water users and river advocates together to add and protect flows on the Poudre River,” said Emily Hunt, Deputy Utilities Director for the City of Thornton. “Thornton is proud to contribute the first deliveries of water in a trial run of this project and is excited to continue its work with the Colorado Water Trust and the Poudre Flows partners to achieve significant environmental benefits for the Poudre River.”
Fly fishing on the Poudre River west of Fort Collins. Photo credit: Colorado Water Trust
The Poudre Flows Project implements a new mechanism known as a Streamflow Augmentation Plan that was approved by the Colorado legislature to help restore depleted river flows. Generally, an augmentation plan is a tool used by water users to increase flexibility and maximize utilization of water supplies on a stream while still protecting other water users. While augmentation plans are typically used to replace water diverted from the river to meet water use needs, the Poudre Flows Project uses this same tool to meet environmental needs by releasing water to the river and protecting it from diversion by others as it flows downstream.
“The Colorado Water Conservation Board is proud to be a part of this critical effort to protect flows on the Cache La Poudre River,” said Lauren Ris, CWCB Director. “Through our agency’s Instream Flow Program, we are able to ensure that the river maintains its vital flows, supporting both the environment and the communities that depend on it. This collaboration highlights the importance of innovative solutions to protect Colorado’s water for generations to come.”
Historically, environmentalists and recreationalists have been at odds with water users who take water out of the river. The Poudre Flows Project is bringing together those who have previously been in conflict, including municipalities, water conservancy districts, state agencies and agricultural producers. This group will strategically leverage water rights to preserve and improve river flows in times of low flow. The Poudre Flows Project has a pending water court case; but in the meantime, Greeley and Thornton have obtained temporary approvals in October from the Colorado Division of Water Resources, via substitute water supply plans, to use their water rights in the Streamflow Augmentation Plan for one year. This is the first Streamflow Augmentation Plan in the state and could be a model for streamflow improvement in other river basins.
Playing in the Poudre River at the Fort Collins whitewater park. Photo credit: Colorado Water Trust
“Greeley is excited to see the Poudre Flows project going live after many years of regional collaboration, enabling legislation, and investment in this innovative water administration strategy,” said Sean Chambers, Director of Water Utilities for the City of Greeley. “The project will physically enhance the Cache la Poudre river, its aquatic habitat, and the administration of water rights, and Greeley appreciates the Colorado Water Trust’s leadership and project management.”
THE POUDRE FLOWS STORY: For more than a decade, the water community of the Poudre River Basin has been working on an innovative plan to reconnect one of the hardest working rivers in Colorado, the Cache la Poudre River. Since the Colorado gold rush in the mid-1800s, people have diverted water from the Cache la Poudre River for beneficial uses that have helped northeastern Colorado grow into the agricultural and industrial powerhouse it is today.
While the Poudre River flows are high during the spring runoff, there are times throughout the year when the river dries out entirely in places below some water-diversion structures. To combat dry conditions and improve river health, local communities have worked hard over the past decade with the goal of improving and bringing vitality to the Cache la Poudre River. The Poudre Flows Project is a perfect example of those efforts.
The Poudre River during a dry-up period. Photo credit: Colorado Water Trust
Colorado Water Trust, a statewide nonprofit organization with a mission to restore water to Colorado’s rivers, has been one small part of this process. Over a decade ago, Colorado Water Trust had an unorthodox, pioneering idea to reconnect the Poudre River, and the water community of the Poudre River Basin said, “Let’s get it done.” A broad collaboration of water providers, cities, state government, nonprofits, and a collective of farmers have worked tirelessly to make this novel idea a reality and rewater the Poudre River. Finally, this year, the Poudre Flows Project will be put into action through the generous contributions of water by the cities of Greeley and Thornton. This is the first step toward reconnecting the Poudre River both now and for future generations.
”The Poudre Flows Project is such a great example of collaboration and innovative thinking when it comes to water, and it shows a recognition of how important our streams are to us as Coloradans,” said Kate Ryan, Executive Director of Colorado Water Trust. “You have all different types of water users on the Poudre River coming together to take responsibility for the health and vitality of this river and to find ways to protect it for future generations. The success of this project could serve as a blueprint across the state for communities of water users to protect their own rivers and streams in the face of a changing climate.”
Colorado’s water landscape is very complex and the legal structure for this project is innovative. The Poudre Flows Project will provide water right owners a flexible opportunity to add their water to the plan on a temporary or permanent basis. This groundbreaking project has the potential to be replicated in other basins throughout Colorado. Lastly, one of the unique aspects of this project is that it doesn’t change the Poudre River from being the hardest-working river in Colorado. Instead, the Poudre Flows Project provides an avenue for optimal management of river water, to protect people’s livelihoods AND the river itself. The Poudre Flows Project proves that if we work together, we can maintain all that we love about Colorado, from the beauty and thrills of a flowing river to the local food and beer that river water helps provide, and the flourishing neighborhoods that depend on the river’s water in their homes.
“Partnerships are the key ingredient to the success of the Poudre Flows Project,” said Katie Donahue, Director of the City of Fort Collins Natural Areas Department. “Together we are launching a new chapter of river resiliency for our community.”
FUNDERS FOR THIS PROJECT INCLUDE: • Xcel Energy Foundation • City of Fort Collins • City of Greeley • City of Thornton • Northern Water • Gates Family Foundation • Eggleston Family Fund of the Community Foundation of Northern Colorado • New Belgium Brewing Company • Odell Brewing Company • Alan Panebaker Memorial Endowment of the Yampa Valley Community Foundation • Telluray Foundation • Colorado Water Conservation Board
Cache la Poudre River drop structure. Photo credit: Northern Water
Cache la Poudre River. Photo credit: Allen BestFort Collins community members kayak and sit on the shore of the Poudre River during the grand opening of the Poudre River Whitewater Park off of North College and Vine Drive Oct. 12. (Alyssa Uhl | The Collegian)Poudre River whitewater park. Photo credit: Rocky Mountain CollegianFort Collins community members kayak and sit on the shore of the Poudre River during the grand opening of the Poudre River Whitewater Park off of North College and Vine Drive Oct. 12. (Alyssa Uhl | The Collegian)Construction begins on Cache la Poudre River for fish ladder near Watson Lake. Photo credit: Jason Clay/Colorado Parks and WildlifeCache la Poudre tributaries cutthroat stocking event August 2020. Photo credit: Jason Clay via Colorado Parks and WildlifeCache la Poudre River May 2018. Photo credit: Greg Hobbs Ralph Parshall squats next to the flume he designed at the Bellevue Hydrology Lab using water from the Cache la Poudre River. 1946. Photo Credit: Water Resource Archive, Colorado State University, via Legacy Water News.Cache la Poudre River from South Trail via Wikimedia Foundation.Grand River Ditch gaging station. Photo credit Greg Hobbs.Cache la Poudre River
Lake Powell has been about a quarter-full. The snowpack looks strong now, but it’s anybody’s guess whether there will be enough runoff come April and May to substantially augment the reservoir. May 2022 photo/Allen Best
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
October 24, 2024
Colorado River Basin states have scaled back their demands on the river. But agreement about solutions proportionate to the challenge remains distant as the 2025 deadline nears.
The story so far: Andy Mueller, the manager of the Colorado River District, the lead water policy body for 15 counties on the Western Slope of Colorado, used his organization’s annual seminar this year to call for the state to begin planning for potential curtailments of diversions. The river has delivered far less water in the 21st century than was assumed by delegates of the seven basin states when they drew up the Colorado River Compact in 1922. Might higher flows resume? Very unlikely, given what we know about climate change. See Part Iof the series and Part II.
“Having a state plan for compact curtailment has been on the table for what seems like forever, likely 2005 to 2007,” said Ken Neubecker. Now semi-retired, he has been carefully watching Colorado River affairs for several decades and has represented several organizations at different times.
Why hasn’t Colorado moved forward with this planning? When I called him to glean his insights, Neubecker shared that he believes it’s because such planning encounters a legal and political minefield.
“It’s not as simple as pre-1922 rights are protected and post-1922 rights are going to be subject to curtailment based on the existing prior appropriation system.”
Denver Water’s Moffat Tunnel diversion from the Fraser River to Boulder Creek. Most of water diverted to Colorado’s Front Range cities from Western Slope rivers and creeks have legal rights junior to the Colorado River compact. Photo/Allen Best
Front Range municipal water providers and many of Colorado’s agriculture diversions are post-1922 compact. And so are some agricultural rights on the Western Slope.
“I think everybody thinks that well, we’re on the slow-moving train and the cliff is getting closer but it’s not close enough – and there are other things that we can do to slow the train down.”
Taylor Hawes, Colorado River Program director for the Nature Conservancy via Water Education Colorado.
Taylor Hawes, who has been monitoring Colorado River affairs for 27 years, now on behalf of The Nature Conservancy, suspects that Colorado doesn’t want to show its legal hand or even admit the potential need to curtail water use in Colorado. She contends that planning will ultimately provide far more value.
“The first rule you learn in working with water is that users want certainty. Planning is something we do in every aspect of our lives, and planning is typically considered smart. It need not be scary,” she told Big Pivots. “We have all learned to plan for the worst and hope for the best.”
Colorado can start by creating a task force or some other extension of the state engineer’s office to begin exploring the mechanisms and pathways that will deliver the certainty.
“We don’t have to have all the answers now,” Hawes said. “And just because you start the process for exploring the mechanism to administer compact compliance rules doesn’t mean you implement them. It will give people an understanding of what to expect, how the state is thinking about it.”
Rio Grande near Monte Vista. Meeting Colorado’s commitments that are specified in the compact governing the Rio Grande requires constant juggling of diversions. Photo/Allen Best
Compacts have forced Colorado to curtail diversions in three other river basins: the Arkansas, Republican and Rio Grande. The Rio Grande offers a graphic example of curtailment of water use as necessary to meet compact obligations on a week-by-week basis.
The Republican River case is a more drawn-out process with a longer timeline and a 2030 deadline. In both places, farmers are being paid to remove their land from irrigation. The Colorado General Assembly this year awarded $30 million each to the two basins to bolster funding for compensation.
A study commissioned by the Nature Conservancy that involved interviews with water managers and others in those river basins had this takeaway message: “the longer (that) actions are delayed to address compact compliance, the less ability local water users have to tailor compliance-related measures to local conditions and needs and reduce their adverse impacts.”
In the Arkansas Basin, Colorado had to pay $30 million and water available to irrigators was reduced by one third.
“That’s the first lesson in how not to do compact compliance: do not wait to be sued because (then you lose) the flexibility to do stuff the right way,” said one unidentified water manager along the Arkansas River.
Neubecker points to another basin, the South Platte. Even in 1967, Colorado legislation recognized a connection between water drawn from wells along the river and flows within the river. The 2002 drought forced the issue, causing Hal Simpson, then the state engineer, to curtail well pumping, creating much anguish.
Ken Neubecker via LinkedIn
Creating a curtailment plan won’t be easy, Neubecker warns. “It could easily take 10 years. ’Look how long it took to create the Colorado Water Plan. It took a couple years and then we had an update five years later. And that was easy compared to this.”
All available evidence suggests the Colorado River Basin states are nowhere near agreement.
In August, Tom Wilmoth provided a perspective from Arizona in a guest opinion published by The Hill under the title of “Time is running out to solve the Colorado River crisis.” As an attorney he has worked for both the Arizona water agency and the Bureau of Reclamation before helping form a law firm in 2008.
“It has taken 24 years for the problem to crystalize, but less than 24 months remain to develop a solution,” he wrote. “Yet there appears to be little urgency in today’s discussion among the Colorado River Basin’s key players.”
Wilmoth said ”Deferring hard conversations today increases the risk of litigation later.” He, like all others, sees a reasonable chance it would end up before the Supreme Court – with the risk of the justices appointing a special master to adjudicate the conflict. “Its recent tendency has been to appoint individuals lacking in subject matter expertise, a troubling prospect given the complex issues at play.”
The area around Yuma, Ariz., and California’s Imperial Valley provide roughly 95% of the vegetables available at grocery stores in the United States during winter months. February 2017 photo/Allen Best
Monitoring the conversations from Southwest Colorado, Rod Proffitt sees Mueller trying to prepare people in the River District for the challenges ahead.
“I think he has tried to scare people. He is trying to get them prepared to make some sacrifices, and limiting growth is a sacrifice.”
A semi-retired water attorney, Proffitt is also a director of Big Pivots, a 501-c-3 non-profit.
Make no mistake, says Proffitt, more cuts in use must be made – and they need to be shared, both in the lower basin and in the upper basin. What those cuts need to be, he isn’t sure. Nor do they necessarily need to be the same.
For example, he can imagine cuts that are triggered by lowering reservoir levels. At a certain point, lower basins must reduce their use by X amount and upper basin states by Y amount.
The federal government has mostly offered carrots to the states to reduce consumption, a recognition of the river’s average 12.4 million acre-feet flows, far short of the flows assumed by the compact. It also has sticks, particularly regarding lower-basin use, but has mostly avoided using its authority. Instead, the lower-basin has reduced use voluntarily, if aided by the federal subsidies.
The Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, have yielded a river of money for projects in the West that broadly seek to improve resiliency in the face of drought and climate change. The seeds have been planted in many places. For example, a recent round of funding produced up to $233 million for the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona for water conservation efforts.
The federal government has also offered incentives to reduce consumption in the upper basin. The System Conservation Pilot Program ran from 2015 to 2018. The 2024 program was funded with $30 million through the Inflation Reduction Act and had hopes for conserving about 66,400 acre-feet.
The federal government, through the Bureau of Reclamation, has clear authority to declared water shortages in the lower basin. It has warned that three million acre-feet less water must be used. The lower-basin argues that the upper basin should share in some of this burden.
Grand Junction has a maze of irrigation canals but the municipal water utility gets water from a creek that flows from the Grand Mesa. Some diversions in Colordo are pre-compact, but many others occurred after 1922. This is a scene from Grand Junction. Photo/Allen Best
Should the federal government get out the stick?
“Nobody wants to apply vinegar this close to the November election,” said James Eklund when we talked in late September about the stalemate on the river.
Eklund has had a long association with the Colorado River. His own family homesteaded on the Western Slope near Colbran in the 1880s and the ranch is still in the family. He lives in Denver, though, and was an assistant attorney in the state attorney general’s office in 2009, when I wrote my first story. He later directed the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the lead agency for state policy.
For the last few years Eklund has been on his own, more or less, a water attorney now working for Sherman and Howard, a leading Denver firm, while trying to represent clients with diverse agriculture water rights.
“Litigation is a failure,” he said when I asked him about Mueller’s remarks in Grand Junction. He contends the upper basin must come to the table with more ideas about how to solve the structural imbalance between supplies and demands than it has so far. And this, he said, will involves some pain.
Creating compact curtailment will involve rule-making, though, and that will take time and effort. Echoing Denver Water’s position, he says it will divert Colorado from the more important and immediate work of helping negotiate solutions.
Eklund suspects an ulterior motive of the River District: to get the state to play its cards on what curtailment could look like so that it can begin jockeying for position.
On the other hand, he believes cutbacks should be premised on two bedrock principles: voluntary and compensated. But Eklund also says that if the situation becomes desperate enough, water will continue to find its way to cities. “The Front Range is not going to bend its knee to alfalfa plants. It’s not going to do it.”
And then, Colorado’s Constitution allows municipalities to take water. It requires compensation.
The Bureau of Reclamation has said the same thing in the lower basin. Las Vegas and other cities will not be allowed to dry up.
The Bureau of Reclamation has said that Las Vegas and other cities will not be cut off from water in the Colordo River. . Photo/Allen Best
But what if compact curtailment means making the hard decision about who doesn’t get water and does not get compensated – people like the farmers near Fort Morgan who, in 2002, had to cease pumping water?
Neubecker characterizes the position of Colorado as one of conflict avoidance. Look at where it got Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minster, in his negotiations with Hitler.
What Colorado must do is prepare for the worst-case scenario. “It’s a doomsday plan,” Neubecker says of compact curtailment. “Make the plan, involve all the people who are going to be effected by the plan, and put it on the shelf – but not too far back on the shelf, just in case you need it”
For now, water levels in the two big reservoirs are holding more or less steady.
Another winter like 2002 could trigger renewed clanging of alarm bells.
John Fleck at Morelos Dam, at start of pulse flow, used 4/4/14 as my new twitter avatar
In New Mexico, Fleck, the author, who also monitors Colorado River matters at his Inkstain blog, rejects the metaphor of the Titanic or the idea that conflict is inevitable. In 2002, California was still using 5.1 million acre-feet from the Colorado River, both for agriculture and to supply the metropolitan areas of Southern California. This was well above the state’s apportionment of 4.4 million acre-feet. “The rhetoric was that it will be a disaster to California’s economy” to return to the allocated flows.
California eventually did cut back and it has done just fine. “Everybody would prefer not to do the adaptation, but they have done it just fine. We see that over and over again in community responses to drought in the Western United States,” he said.
Lake Powell currently has filled to 40% of capacity, a marked improvement from February 2023, when the reservoir had fallen to 22% of capacity. Mead is at 36% of capacity. The situation is not as tense as it was two years ago. That could change in the blink of another hot, dry runoff like that in 2002.
Figure 2. Graph showing reservoir storage between 1 January 2023 and 15 October 2024, highlighting the amount of reservoir recovery during each snowmelt season and the amount of reservoir drawdown during intervening periods. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies
Click the link to read the article on the Denver Water website (Cathy Proctor and Jay Adams):
October 23, 2024
Preparing a water system to meet future challenges means investing in a flexible, resilient operation that’s ready for just about anything — such as a warming climate, pandemics, population growth, periodic droughts, competition for water resources, security threats and changing regulatory environments.
From meeting day-to-day challenges to addressing long-range issues, Denver Water is building and maintaining just such a system, one that stretches from the mountains to homes and businesses across the Denver metro area.
The goal: Ensuring a clean, safe, reliable water supply for 1.5 million people, about 25% of Colorado’s population, now and in the future.
To continue meeting that goal, Denver Water expects to invest about $1.8 billion into its water system during the next 10 years, from large projects to regular inspection and maintenance programs designed to ensure the system is flexible, resilient and efficient.
In addition to rates paid by customers, funding for Denver Water’s infrastructure projects, day-to-day operations and emergency expenses, like water main breaks, comes from bond sales, cash reserves, hydropower sales, grants, federal funding and fees paid when new homes and buildings are connected to the system. The utility does not make a profit or receive tax dollars.
Here’s an overview of some of Denver Water’s recently completed and ongoing work:
Northwater Treatment Plant
Denver Water in 2024 celebrated the completion of the new, state-of-the-art Northwater Treatment Plant next to Ralston Reservoir north of Golden. The new treatment plant was completed on schedule and under budget.
The treatment plant can clean up to 75 million gallons of water per day and the plant’s design left room for the plant to be expanded to clean up to 150 million gallons of water per day in the future as needed.
A major feature of the site visible from Highway 93 is the round, concrete tops of two giant water storage tanks. Most of the two tanks are buried underground; each tank is capable of holding 10 million gallons of clean, safe drinking water.
The plant is a major part of Denver Water’s North System Renewal Project, a multi-year initiative that included building a new, 8.5-mile pipeline between the Northwater Treatment Plant and the Moffat Treatment Plant. The new pipe, completed in 2022, replaced one that dated from the 1930s.
The Moffat Treatment Plant, which also started operations in the 1930s, is still used a few months during the year and will eventually transition to a water storage facility.
Lead Reduction Program
The water Denver Water delivers to customers is lead-free, but lead can get into drinking water as the water passes through old lead service lines that carry water from the water main in the street into the home.
The Lead Reduction Program, which launched in January 2020, is the biggest public health campaign in the utility’s history and considered a leader in the effort to remove lead pipes from the nation’s drinking water infrastructure.
Denver Water crews dug up old lead service lines from customers’ homes for years of study that led to the utility’s Lead Reduction Program. Denver Water has replaced more than 28,000 old, customer-owned lead service lines at no direct cost to the customer. Photo credit: Denver Water. Photo credit: Denver Water.
The program reduces the risk of lead getting into drinking water by raising the pH of the water delivered and replacing the estimated 60,000 to 64,000 old, customer-owned lead service lines at no direct cost to the customer. Households enrolled in the program are communicated with regularly and provided with water pitchers and filters certified to remove lead to use for cooking, drinking and preparing infant formula until six months after their lead service line is replaced.
To date, Denver Water has replaced more than 28,000 customer-owned lead service lines at no direct cost to the customers. The program received $76 million in federal funding in 2022 to help accelerate the pace of replacement work in underserved communities, resulting in thousands of additional lines being replaced during 2023 and 2024.
Water storage
Work on the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project, the subject of more than 20 years of planning, got underway in April 2022. Expected to be complete in 2027, the project will raise the height of the existing dam by 131 feet.
The higher dam will nearly triple the amount of water that can be stored in Gross Reservoir, providing Denver Water with more flexibility to manage its water supply in the face of increasingly variable weather and snowpack patterns.
Check out the work done on Gross Dam during summer 2024:
After two years of preparation and foundation work, Gross Dam’s new look began to take shape in 2024 when workers began placing new, roller-compacted concrete at the base of the Boulder County dam in early May.
Raising the dam involves building 118 steps on the downstream side of the dam. Each step is 4 feet tall with a 2-foot setback.
At the height of construction, there will be as many as 400 workers on-site, and when complete the dam will be the tallest in Colorado.
Ongoing investments for the future
As the metro area grows and changes, it’s often an opportunity for Denver Water to upgrade older elements of its system.
Denver Water is continuing its investment in replacing about 80,000 feet of water mains under streets every year while also installing new water delivery pipe where needed. The utility has more than 3,000 miles of pipe in its system, enough to stretch from Seattle to Orlando.
In early 2025, Denver Water will wrap up a major project: replacing 5 miles of 130-year-old water pipe under East Colfax Avenue, from Broadway to Yosemite Street. The pipe replacement work was done in advance of the East Colfax Bus Rapid Transit project. That effort, led by the Denver Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, broke ground in early October.
In addition to replacing the water mains under Colfax, Denver Water crews are replacing any lead service lines they encounter during the project.
Changing our landscapes
In recognition of the drought in the Colorado River Basin, Denver Water and several large water providers across the basin in 2022 committed to substantially expanding existing efforts to conserve water.
Among the goals outlined in the agreement is the replacement of 30% of the nonfunctional, water-intensive Kentucky bluegrass in our communities — like the decorative expanses of turf grass in traffic medians — with more natural ColoradoScapes that include water-wise plants and cooling shade trees that offer more benefits for our climate, wildlife and the environment.
Denver Water supported a new state law passed in 2024 designed to halt the expansion of nonfunctional, water-thirsty grass by prohibiting the planting or installation of high-water-using turf in commercial, institutional, or industrial property or a transportation corridor. The bill takes effect Jan. 1, 2026. The new law doesn’t affect residential properties.
To help customers remodel their landscapes to create diverse, climate-resilient ColoradoScapes, Denver Water offered two workshops this year and is planning additional workshops in 2025. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Denver Water also is working with partners — including local governments, fellow water providers and experts in water use and landscapes — to develop programs that will help transform our landscapes and expand our indoor and outdoor conservation efforts.
The utility in 2024 held water-wise gardening workshops and offered a limited number of customer discounts on Resource Central’s popular Garden In A Box water-wise garden kits and turf removal services.
Get tips and information about rebates available for conserving water indoors and out at denverwater.org/Conserve.
The utility also has started work transforming its own landscapes, including about 12,000 square feet around its Einfeldt pump station near the University of Denver. It’s Youth Education program has helped Denver-area students remodel landscapes at their schools.
And it’s supporting partners, such as Denver’s Parks and Recreation Department, which is replacing 10 acres of water-intensive Kentucky bluegrass covering the traffic medians on Quebec Street south of Interstate 70. The project is replacing the homogenous expanse of turf with a closely managed, water-wise Colorado prairie meadow filled with grasses and wildflowers that provide habitat to pollinators.
These projects are examples of how Denver Water is planning for a warmer, drier future by partnering with our community. Together, we can build a system and a landscape that supports our customers and creates a thriving, vibrant community now and in the future.
Denver Water’s collection system via the USACE EIS
A “water year” with two troubling features — a slow start to winter’s mountain snowpack and a very hot, very dry summer — wound up in surprising ways.
In short, despite those two big factors, supplies for Denver Water remained strong and the 2023-24 water year, having opened with drama, closed as a quiet success.
Strontia Springs Dam, seen here about 6 miles up Waterton Canyon, received enough water to fill in 2024, with extra spilled into the South Platte River. Photo credit: Denver Water.
What’s a water year? It’s that span from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30 that water utilities, hydrologists and other experts use to track the flow of annual precipitation, from early snowfall through runoff and the months of water use on farm fields and in cities.
And the water year ending last month, on Sept. 30, 2024, clocked in as a good one for Denver Water.
After the slow start, snowpack improved over late winter and spring, reservoirs filled and spilled and customers mostly stuck to watering rules, even amid a scorching, low-rain summer in Denver Water’s service area.
Some high notes from the past 12 months:
It marked the first year since 2019 that peak snowpack in both of Denver Water’s key river basins was above normal: 101% in the South Platte River basin and 124% in the Colorado River basin.
Denver Water’s reservoirs hit capacity, always an important outcome. And a two of those — Cheesman and Strontia Springs — spilled with excess water for the first time since 2019. Two others, Dillon and Williams Fork, spilled for the second straight year.
Supplies were so strong on the Front Range that Denver Water kept Roberts Tunnel — the conveyance that brings water from Dillon Reservoir on the West Slope — turned off for six months, from January to mid-July. The Moffat Tunnel that brings water from the Fraser River to Gross Reservoir was offline for three weeks in June.
It marked a remarkable turnaround from some big obstacles earlier in the year.
By mid-January 2024, anemic snowpack was ranked among the five worst totals for that time of year on record.
After a slow start to the year, a series of snowstorms boosted the snowpack, supporting recreation on Denver Water’s reservoirs, including paddleboarding on Dillon Reservoir, throughout the summer. Photo credit: Denver Water.
And a tough summer awaited. Denver Water’s records put the summer of 2024 as the fifth-hottest in the region. And precipitation was weak, ranking fourth worst in the utility’s service area.
But after that slow start, the snowpack rallied. Big snows occurred in late January, followed by normal snows in February and a big March storm that pushed snowpack numbers up, especially in the North Fork of the South Platte River.
Then, in a big surprise, the storms kept coming. Not only in April but in May, also, weeks beyond the point snowpack typically stops building.
More good news followed. Spring soil moisture was in good shape, so water stayed in streams and filled reservoirs instead of soaking into bone-dry ground, a frequent problem in recent years.
Then, customers did their part, largely adhering to watering rules that kept water use stable even amid such a hot and dry summer.
Daily use in Denver Water’s service area never soared above average and total summer demand from customers hewed close to normal.
“Customers continue to understand the basics: Don’t water in the heat of the day, turn off your irrigation after rainstorms. Keep your watering to two or, at most, three days a week,” said Nathan Elder, Denver Water’s manager of water supplies.
More customers are remodeling their yards and replacing water-needy Kentucky bluegrass with water-wise ColoradoScapes like this one that thrives in our semi-arid climate. Photo credit: Denver Water.
For Elder, the success story of the 2024 water year was how well Denver Water was able to manage its system to maximize flows for recreation and the environment.
Healthy supplies meant more water releases from Dillon that bolstered rafting in the Blue River. Good supplies also helped support rafting on the North Fork for the annual BaileyFest event. It also kept reservoir elevations high for flatwater recreation, such as boating and paddleboarding.
It also allowed releases to help aquatic environments, such as keeping stream temperatures in a safe range for fish in the Fraser River and providing flushing flows to improve fish habitat on the South Platte.
Supplies also helped ensure Denver Water could provide water downstream on the Colorado River to support endangered fish above Grand Junction.
“After a nerve-wracking start, the water year improved in a hurry,” Elder said. “Full reservoirs and good runoff give us the flexibility to move water around in a way that helps a lot of interests while serving our customers.”
Now, as the new water year kicks off, the watch for precipitation begins.
And we enter the new water year with good news: Denver Water reservoirs begin the 2024-25 water year with good supplies. But a dry summer in the region has left dry, thirstier soils that could drink up melting snow next spring. That could make 2025 trickier.
The wait, and watch, is on.
With the 2023-24 water year now in the books, Denver Water’s planners are eyeing the weather patterns to see what the winter storms will bring. Mountain snowpack, captured and stored in mountain reservoirs such as Strontia Springs (pictured) supplies most of Denver’s water. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Roaring Fork River September 2022. Photo credit: Allen Best
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
October 22, 2024
Our story so far: Andy Mueller used the Colroado River District seminar this year to call for Colorado to begin planning for potential curtailment of the Colorado River. The state engineer, who is legally responsible for such planning, it it occurs, pushed back, saying first things first. For Part I, go here.
Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District, has used the district’s annual seminar in Grand Junction in years past to warn of a worsening situation in the Colorado River Basin. Two years ago, for example, he warned that flows were already well below the 20th century averages. Might those flows of 13.5 to 14 million acre feet further decline to 9.5 million acre-feet in decades ahead?
Even relatively healthy snowfalls don’t necessarily produce robust volumes of runoff. For example, snow during the winter of 2023-24 was good but runoff just 84% of average.
“A new different” is how Dave Kanzer, the River District’s director for science and interstate matters, described the runoff numbers. [ed. emphasis mine]
“We are just kind of treading water, and where we are next year could be similar to where we are this year — unless something changes,” he added during the district’s seminar in Grand Junction. “There’s a lot of uncertainty.”
Warming temperatures most likely will produce continued declines in river flows. That was a key takeaway of the presentation by Russ Schumacher, the state climatologist. He’s a careful scientist, clear to differentiate what is known from that which is not. Much of what he said was not particularly new. Some of the conclusions he offered were little changed from those of a decade ago – but with one key difference. Another decade of data has been compiled to support those conclusions.
Seven of Colorado’s nine warmest years have occurred since 2012. The rise can be seen most clearly in summer and fall records. This past summer was part of that trend. It was the sixth hottest summer in Colorado’s recorded history going back to the late 1800s.
Some places were hotter than others, though. In Grand Junction, gages at Walker Airfield recorded the hottest June-August period ever, an average of more than 80 degrees. That’s the average temperature 24/7, day and night.
Precipitation? No clear trend has emerged. Levels vary greatly from year to year.
Graphic credit: Russ Schumacher/Colorado Climate Center
Integration of temperature and precipitation records tell a more complex and concerning story. Rising temperatures have produced earlier runoff. The warmth also exacerbates evapotranspiration, which is also called evaporative demand. The warmer it is, the more surface air draws water from the plants and dries out the soils.
The most powerful way of explaining all this was in two sequences of slides, one of which is reproduced here.
“The timing shift, even if the peak doesn’t change all that much – the timing is quite important,” said Schumacher. Colorado River flows at Dotsero, near Glenwood Canyon, have already declined 25% during late summer.
Schumacher and other scientists describe predictions with various degrees of confidence. There is, he said, high confidence of a future warming atmosphere that to an even greater degree reduces runoff no matter how much snow falls in winter. We can be sure of temperatures rising between one and four degrees F by mid-century, he said.
Unless Colorado gets far more snow and rain, the ColoradoRiver will decline further. [ed. emphasis mine]
Future warming depends upon how rapidly greenhouse gas emissions rise globally. In mid-October, they were at 418 parts per million high on the slopes of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa. They were 315 when the first measurements were taken there in 1958 and roughly 280 at the start of the industrial era.
Graphic credit: Russ Schumacher/Colorado Climate Center
And that returns us to the Colorado River Compact, the foundation for deciding who gets what and where in the basin — and who doesn’t.
In 1922, when the Colorado River Compact was drawn up at a lodge near Santa Fe, the Colorado River had been producing uncommonly robust flows. In their 2019 book, “Science Be Dammed,” Fleck and Eric Kuhn, the former general manager of the River District, explained that ample evidence even in 1922 existed of drier times just decades before. Later evidence documented lesser flows in the centuries and millennia before.
Not only were flows in the Colorado River during the 20th century much less than was assumed by the compact, the document failed altogether to acknowledge water rights for Ute, Navajo and 28 other Native America tribes in the basin who were to get water as would be necessary to sustain agricultural ways of life. Just how much had not been determined, although it’s now estimated at 20% of the river’s total flow. Some claims still have not been adjudicated.
Mueller called it a “flawed document” produced by a “flawed process” that had “faulty hydrological assumptions” and did not include “major groups of people who reside in and own water rights in this basin.”
A March 31, 1922 photo of the Colorado River Commission. Standing left to right: Delph E. Carpenter (Colorado), James G. Scrugham (Nevada), R. E. Caldwell (Utah), Frank C. Emerson (Wyoming), Stephen B. Davis, Jr. (New Mexico), W. F. McClure (California) and W. S. Norviel (Arizona). Seated: Gov. Emmet D. Boyle (Nevada), Gov. Oliver H. Shoup (Colorado), Herbert Hoover (federal representative and chair) and Gov. Merritt C. Mecham (New Mexico). The governors were not members of the Commission. Photo: Colorado State University Library
For its time, though, the compact was a grand bargain. Colorado’s Delph Carpenter was a key negotiator. He had realized that if diversions from the Colorado River were determined by the doctrine of prior appropriation, the bedrock for water law in Colorado and most other states, the upper-basin states would lose out because they would develop the Colorado River more slowly. Instead, the compact created an equitable apportionment, essentially a 50-50 split of the water between upper and lower-basin states.
It was the foundation for what is now called the Law of the River, by which is meant the many laws, court decrees and agreements concerning both surpluses and droughts.
Dams were built, diversion structures constructed – including, because of a law of Congress in 1968, the Central Arizona Project (which also resulted in dams on the Animas and Dolores rivers in Western Colorado). That 1968 legislation, the Colorado River Basin Project Act, recognized that the river would be short by as much as two million acre-feet, said Mueller.
And then the agreements of the 21st century have tried to acknowledge lesser flows. But they have also deferred the really hard questions. The harder questions, as Mueller suggested, may yet provoke the states to get out their legal swords.
Central to the dispute is how much water should the upper basin states be releasing from Lake Powell? This is the key clause in the compact: “The States of the Upper Division will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years …”
Lee Ferry, located in Arizona but a few miles downstream from Glen Canyon Dam, is the formal dividing point between the upper-basin states and lower-basin states in the Colorado River. It is also the put-in location for boaters rafting or kayaking the Grand Canyon. Photo/Allen Best
Flows from Colorado and other upper-division states have been about 86 million acre-feet over the last 10 years.
Lower-basin states say no, that’s not enough. They argue that the upper basin states need to accept cuts, too.
For now, there is no dispute that the upper basin states are meeting that obligation. But what if a string of years like those of 2002-2004 return? And what if the case ends up before the Supreme Court and that court ultimately rules against the upper basin?
This sets up the potential – Mueller characterized it as a certainty – for conflict, a court case that will have to go before the U.S. Supreme Court.
“I don’t believe we’re violating the compact today, and I don’t think we’re going to be violating the compact necessarily if the river drops, if our delivery below Glen Canyon drops,” he said. “What I can tell you is we’re going to have litigation.”
In May 2022, a couple paused at once had been the bottom of the boat put-in ramp in Antelope Canyon to lok down on the receding waters of Lake Powell. The reservoir at that point was 22% full. Photo/Allen Best
Colorado, Mueller asserted, must put together rules for how it will handle shortages if the state must curtail it diversions in order to allow water to flow downstream. He called it a painful process but warned that the “future is not far away.”
The River District position is that the burden within Colorado cannot fall entirely on the Western Slope and its ag users. Programs designed to reduce compensation have been focused solely on the Western Slope and agriculture, says Lindsay DeFrates, deputy director of public relations.
“If we are looking to reduce water long term, we can’t put it on the backs of West Slope users,” she says. “It has to be a shared burden.”
Journalists insist that it’s Western Slope. People in the water community invariably say “West Slope.”
Next: Colorado River Basin states have scaled back their demands on the river. But But agreement about solutions proportionate to the challenge remain distant as deadline near.
Colorado transmountain diversions via the State Engineer’s office
Workers from Denver Water and contractor Kiewit Barnard stand in front of Gross Dam in May to mark the start of the dam raise process. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck):
October 18, 2024
A federal judge this week criticized the federal government for failing to consider the risk of a Colorado River Compact call in its environmental review of the planning for Denver Water’s expansion of Gross Reservoir in Boulder County.
Wrangling over the risk of a compact call – which the judge said could force water use reductions in the Upper Basin if the Upper Basin states fail to deliver enough water past Lee Ferry to the Lower Basin – has been a key point in current negotiations between the two basins over future Colorado River operations.
The ruling, in a lawsuit against Gross Reservoir expansion by Save the Colorado River and others, allows construction to proceed, but criticizes the project’s planners for not considering the fact that the risk of a compact call means there might not be enough water to fill it. (Here’s Elise Schmelzer’s article about the decision.)
In the decision, federal judge Christine Arguello noted that the Army Corps of Engineers environmental review of the project “rests on the assumption that there will be no compact call…. However, considering the American West’s last few decades of severe aridity, such an assumption warrants considerable scrutiny.”
Here’s the full language from Arguello’s ruling. I’ve bolded the key bits:
Colorado River headwaters-marker. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
October 20, 2024
Andy Mueller, the general manager of the Colorado River District, delivered a strong message at the organization’s annual seminar in September. It was time, he declared, for Colorado to plan for potential curtailment of Colorado River diversions as necessary to comply with the compact governing the river among the seven basin states.
Colorado transmountain diversions via the State Engineer’s office
Compact curtailment, sometimes described as a compact call, means that those with water rights junior to or filed since the Colorado River Compact of 1922 would be vulnerable to having no water. That could potentially include most of Colorado’s Front Range cities, which get roughly half of their water from the Colorado River and its tributaries. It could also include some towns and cities on the Western Slope and even some farmers and ranchers on the Western Slope as well as some ag users reliant upon transmountain diversions.
The precise trigger for such a call, reduced flows to lower-basin states, is open to argument. An ambiguous clause in the compact could be hotly debated, and likely will be, if river flows continue to decline. Mueller spoke of legal saber rattling by lower basin states.
This is not entirely a new subject. Colorado has been talking about the potential for compact curtailment for about 20 years but has not pursued it. The state government disputes the immediate need. What almost everyone can agree upon, however, is that it will be foolish to assume that the near-average or better river flows of the last two years will prevail.
Reservoir levels in the basin have been sagging for most of the 21st century. Most dramatic was the runoff in 2002 when the river yielded only 3.8 million acre-feet. Delegates of the seven basin states who had gathered near Santa Fe in 1922 to apportion the river assumed average flows of at least five times that much.
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the ‘hole’ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really don’t change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
Flows in 2003 and 2004 were only marginally better. Slowly, there was acceptance of extended drought unknown in the 20th century. In 2017, a study by Brad Udall and Jonathon Overpeck identified warming temperatures as just as important as drought in explaining the declines. They called it aridification.
By May 2022, the situation looked grim at Powell, the reservoir that the upper basin uses to fulfill its commitment to lower basin states as specified by the compact to the lower-basin states. Water levels had receded so much that tracks laid into the canyon wall to construct Glen Canyon Dam emerged. They had been underwater since the reservoir began filling in the mid-1960s.
It might have worsened. Modeling evaluated the risk of Powell having too little water to generate electricity by the next year. Some talked about potential for the reservoir to have too little water to pass any downstream, what is called dead storage.
Snow fell in prodigious quantities in the winter of 2022-2023 in Steamboat Springs and some other locations along the headwaters of the Colorado River and its tributaries, temporarily averting crisis on the Colorado River. Photo/Allen Best
Instead of further decline, snow fell in prodigious quantities during the next winter of 2022-2023 across parts of Colorado, which is responsible for 55% of total flows in the river, as well as in Wyoming and other upstream locations. Stock fences were entirely buried in some places of the Yampa Valley.
The runoff that resulted was the third-best in the Colorado River in the 21st century. Five more consecutive runoffs of the same magnitude would fill Powell and all the other reservoirs in the Colorado River Basin, according to Utah State University’s Jack Schmidt.
What if, instead of epochal snows in the Rockies, pitiful runoffs parallel to those of 2002 to 2004 return?
“Let’s hope for the best and plan for the worst,” Mueller said at the seminar in Grand Junction held by the River District. The Glenwood Springs-based district — its official title is the Colorado River Water Conservation District — was created in 1938 to represent the interests of 15 of the 20 counties on the Colorado River drainage.
Several people who heard Mueller’s remarks applauded them. Colorado, they say, should not wait until the very last minute before devising a strategy. Curtailing water use will be a very difficult and lengthy process. Better to get on it now.
But there is also another level to the discussion, one of moral and ethical questions, according to one long-time Colorado Rive observer
“How do we, as a community of two nations, seven states and Mexico, and 30 sovereigns (Native American tribes) — how do we come together to recognize that this is a shared resource, and climate change is changing the resource. We need to understand how to collaboratively share the resource in a way that will be necessary to live in a climate-altered world,” says John Fleck, an Albuquerque-based author of several books, including “Water is for Fighting Over: And Other Myths about Water in the West.”
Colorado and other upper basin states, he observes, are saying it’s not their problem because they have met their commitments.
”That is morally wrong to me,” he said in an interview. As a practical matter, it’s also “seems really dumb” because in the political and legal system the upper basin states are unlikely to win that argument in a drier 21st century. “That just ain’t gonna work.”
The Colorado River Compact of 1922 apportions waters between the upper and lower basins. Lee Ferry, just a few miles below Glen Canyon, along the Utah-Arizona border, divides the two. Water from the river is also exported outside the basin to agricultureal areas of eastern Colorado and cities of the Front Range as well as southern California, Albuquerque and other places. Map credit: AGU
The 1922 compact apportioned 7.5 million acre-feet for the upper basin states – Colorado as well as New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — and 7.5 million acre-feet for the three lower basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada. The compact assumed deliveries to Mexico would be required by a future compact, and they also realized significant evaporation. Altogether, they assumed more than 20 million acre-feet flows in the river. That has rarely happened.
The debated clause is called the “non-depletion obligation.” It says the upper basin states must allow river flows of 75 million acre-feet over a rolling 10-year average at Lee Ferry. Lee Ferry is in Arizona, just below Glen Canyon and a few miles above the Grand Canyon.
Colorado’s position is two-fold. It argues that the lower basin overuse remains the primary problem coupled with climate change. And Colorado and its siblings in the upper basin didn’t create either.
“We take the position that we are not the cause of trending lower flows over the past 20 years,” said Jason Ullman, the state water engineer in a statement from the Colorado Department of Water Resources in response to a query by Big Pivots. “Climate change and aridification impact snowpack and soil moisture, which in turn reduce flows into the Colorado.”
Colorado and other upper-basin states altogether use between 3.5 and 4.5 million acre-feet annually compared to roughly 10 million acre-feet by the lower-basin states.
Denver Water, which provides water for the city and many of its suburbs, warns that compact curtailment planning might distract Colorado from negotiations with other states. Photo/Allen Best
“This is why Colorado believes that the responsibility to bring the river back into balance primarily lies with the lower basin and the need to bring uses within their compact apportionment with a plan to use less during times of shortage,” Ullman said.
Mueller, in his remarks at Grand Junction, didn’t disagree with that stance. But he insisted that Colorado needs to prepare a backup plan if the state must releases more water downstream, forcing the curtailment of its diversions.
“I think the best thing our state can do is, while continuing to make a very good case that we’re not the cause of this and that climate change is causing it, we need to be prepared in the event it occurs,” said Mueller
River District directors had recently asked Ullmann to “please get moving with compact curtailment rules,” he said.
The state needs to come up with the “right funds, have the right personnel, and get moving with our compact curtailment rules,” said Mueller.
This, he added, should not be seen as a sign of weakness by Colorado in the interstate negotiations, but rather as a sign “that we’re smart, that we’re helping our water users and our communities plan for the future.”
Colorado and other basin states are in the midst of negotiating new guidelines that govern operation of the two big reservoirs, Mead and Powell. The first set of guidelines were adopted by the states and the Bureau of Reclamation in 2007.
The regulations were abetted by the drought contingency plan, which brought cuts in water use to the lower basin and new water management tools to the upper basin.
The 2007 guidelines expire at the end of 2026. The states must come up with a new agreement that recognizes the shifted realities by the end of 2025.
Lake Powell was at 22% of capacity in May 2022 when this photograph was taken, revealing a ledge near the dam that had been used to construct Glen Canyon Dam. Photo/Allen Best
Lake Powell was at 22% of capacity in May 2022 a few weeks prior, a track used in that construction emerged from the receding waters, the first time it had been above water since Powell filled in the 1960s. Photo/Allen Best
State government does not absolutely reject the need for compact compliance rules, but the statement attributed to Ullman cites these negotiations.
“It would be imprudent to undertake any rule-making for compact compliance without knowing the terms of any seven-state consensus regarding operating guidelines that includes releases from Powell. Therefore, it is the position of the state engineer that undertaking compact compliance rule-making now would be premature.”
That sounds like no. But there’s more.
The state engineer has the exclusive authority to make and enforce regulations that enable Colorado to meet its compact commitments.
“Colorado recognizes that the first critical step in being able to administer to the compact, if necessary, is the ability to accurately measure diversions,” said Ullman in the written statement. “The state engineer is pursuing measurement rules for diversions to establish accuracy standards and better define where measurement is necessary. The goals of this effort include increasing the consistency of water right measurement so that Colorado sends only what is required to maintain compact compliance and not more.”
How much Colorado might have to curtail would depend upon findings of the Upper Colorado River Commission, which is governed by a 1948 compact.
The state engineer has adopted rules for one of the four water divisions on the Western Slope, and work is progressing in a second district. The engineer plans to also adopt measurement rules in the other two districts.
What do the big Front Range diverters with post-compact water rights have to say?
Denver Water falls in line behind the state position. It has major diversions from the Colorado River tributaries in Grand and Summit counties.
“We recognize interest from some in rules for compact administration, but it’s very important that this effort be undertaken at the right time, with thoughtful collaboration among water interests statewide. We know that the State Engineer laid out a potential process a few years ago, with the first step being a focus on measurement rules. If and when it becomes necessary to take further action, we trust the State Engineer to so do. In the meantime, we think it’s critical that states, including Colorado, should keep their focus on the post-2026 guidelines being negotiated now, and not be distracted during a process of the greatest importance to Colorado’s future.”
Northern Water, operator of the Colorado Big-Thompson diversions from the Colorado River headwaters in Grand County, says it will defer to the state. “Northern Water looks to the State of Colorado as the leader on matters related to interstate water agreements,” said public information officer Jeff Stahla.
The $33 million Colorado River Connectivity Channel diverts the river around the Windy Gap Dam to improve river health, fish passage and habitat in the upper headwaters of the Colorado River. (Northern Water, Contributed)
With the snip of a ribbon Tuesday, Colorado water managers officially opened a new waterway in Grand County that reconnects a stretch of the Colorado River for the first time in four decades to help fish and aquatic life.
The milelong waterway, called the Colorado River Connectivity Channel, skirts around Windy Gap Reservoir, where a dam has broken the natural flow of the river since 1985. The $33 million project’s goal is to return a stretch of the river to its former health, a river where aquatic life thrived and fish could migrate and spawn. But getting to the dedication ceremony Tuesday took years of negotiations that turned enemies into collaborators and can serve as a model for future water projects, officials say.
“It speaks to the new reality of working on water projects, which is that it doesn’t have to be an us-versus-them situation,” Northern Water spokesperson Jeff Stahla said. “People can get together and identify things that can help not only the water supply, but also help the environment.”
Windy Gap Reservoir and the new channel are just off U.S. 40 near Granby, a few miles southwest of popular recreation areas around Lake Granby and Grand Lake.
The reservoir was designed to deliver an average of 48,000 acre-feet of water per year from Grand County through numerous reservoirs, ditches, canals and pipelines to faucets in homes and sprinklers on farms across northeastern Colorado. One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to three households.
But soon after construction finished in 1985, locals and fly fishermen started noticing problems — starting with the bugs.
Drivers used to cleaning insects out of their radiators suddenly had one less chore as certain types of mayflies, stoneflies and caddisflies disappeared. In 2011, state biologists calculated a 38% loss in diversity between the early 1980s and 2011.
The dam blocked fish passage, and the reservoir became a breeding ground for whirling disease, a deadly condition for local trout caused by a microscopic parasite.
Windy Gap Reservoir before construction started for the Colorado River Connectivity Channel. The dam, built in 1985, blocked the Colorado River and inhibited a healthy fishery. The new channel around the reservoir will improve the health of the Upper Colorado River. (Northern Water, Contributed)
It choked seasonal high flows. Without the flows to flush the sediment from between small rocks, the habitat for a fundamental food source, small organisms called macroinvertebrates, diminished. The sculpin, a small fish that often serves as an indicator of river health, disappeared entirely.
Macro Invertebrates via Little Pend Oreille Wildlife Refuge Water Quality Research
“The ecosystem started crashing,” said Kirk Klancke, a longtime conservationist in the area. “It didn’t die out completely, but it certainly started crashing. We lost all the sensitive, most important macroinvertebrates.”
The fishery’s gold medal status was threatened, and losing that would have been a blow to the local economy, he said.
The reservoir also couldn’t reliably serve its main purpose: catching water and pumping it 6 miles to Lake Granby to eventually reach the Front Range. When the lake is filled to the brim in wet years, it can’t store Windy Gap’s water, leaving northeastern communities in the lurch, according to Northern Water.
Restoring a river channel in the Upper Colorado Basin. Graphic credit: Northern Water
The new channel is the fix.
To create the channel, the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District started work in 2022, draining Windy Gap Reservoir and cutting its size in half. The result is a smaller reservoir and a floodplain through which the channel flows.
Crews built a new diversion headgate — the main focus of the dedication this week — that manages how much water enters the reservoir from the channel. They removed a small, upstream dam crossing the Fraser River that blocked fish passage.
After vegetation is established, the channel will open to fishing and recreation, likely around 2027.
Water has been flowing through the channel for about a year, and officials are already seeing benefits: Colorado Parks and Wildlife said Tuesday that the sculpin has been detected in that stretch for the first time in 20 years.
“Seeing the project come to fruition, and then getting the bonus of having wildlife biologists tell you, ‘Yep, we’re already seeing signs of biological healing,’ was just mind blowing,” said Tony Kay, former president of Trout Unlimited who has been working on connecting the river for 26 years.
It was emotional. Not everyone who started this process was able to see it through to the end, like Bud Isaacs, a downstream landowner who was one of the first to raise the alarm and who passed away in 2022, Kay said.
“We never actually thought that this would happen,” he said.
The channel is also one facet of a sweeping, multimillion-dollar plan to fix multiple problems in one go.
Through the Windy Gap Firming Project, growing Front Range communities will have more reliable water storage in the form of Chimney Hollow Reservoir, which is under construction near Loveland and will work in tandem with Windy Gap to provide water supplies.
The effort to build the connectivity channel has seemed slow moving at times, but officials, environmentalists and urban areas are celebrating it as an example of hard-won collaboration.
“It was a gamble to partner with Front Range water diverters. There were a lot of people who told us you can’t do deals with the devil. You’re going to end up really regretting it,” Klancke said. “The connectivity channel has proved we went down the right road.”
It’s also just one step in addressing chronic low-flow issues along the upper Colorado River caused by drought and massive water diversions to Colorado’s Front Range, Klancke said.
In five years time, Kay hopes to see a healed river through the new channel and farther downstream. He’ll be saying “thank you” every time he drives past that stretch of the river.
The dam raise process begins at the bottom of the dam using roller-compacted concrete to build the new steps that will go up the face of the dam. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer). Here’s an excerpt:
October 17, 2024
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers violated the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act when approving permits for the construction of the dam, U.S. District Court Judge Christine Arguello found in the ruling, issued Wednesday. The federal agency failed to sufficiently consider other options that could be less environmentally damaging than dam expansion, Arguello wrote in her order. Arguello did not order Denver Water to stop construction on the dam, in part because the utility already plans to halt construction in November for the winter season. An abrupt halt to the project could also affect the integrity of the dam, she wrote. The defendants and plaintiffs will now work to create a remedy for the improperly issued permits. Each side must submit briefs on proposed solutions to Arguello by Nov. 15. In a statement, Denver Water said it still hopes “to move the project toward completion.”
[…]
Denver Water argued in its filings that the issues raised were moot since construction had already begun and one of the permits in question already used. Arguello, however, dismissed that argument, as the reservoir had not yet been expanded and the 400 acres of land and 500,000 trees it would drown still remained above water…
One of the Army Corps of Engineers’ failures was its lack of analysis of how climate change could impact the project. As climate change shrinks the amount of water available in the Colorado River system, Arguello asked, is it practical and reasonable to build a reservoir to store water that doesn’t exist? The lack of analysis shows that the USACE did not fully analyze the practicality of the dam project, as required by law, she wrote.
Water stored in Colorado’s Denver Basin aquifers, which extend from Greeley to Colorado Springs, and from Golden to the Eastern Plains near Limon, does not naturally recharge from rain and snow and is therefore carefully regulated. Courtesy U.S. Geological Survey.
Nearly 40 years ago, after watching aquifers below Douglas County plunge amid fast growth and heavy use, Colorado lawmakers adopted a “sip slowly” management process that required communities such as Parker and Castle Rock to pump out fixed amounts of nonrenewable groundwater each year in an effort to make the resource last at least 100 years.
Fast forward to 2020. That year, the state directed well owners to sip even slower, explicitly stating how much water their permits entitled them to, and requiring them to stop pumping at the end of that 100-year period if they have fully used the water to which they were entitled when the original well permits were issued.
But Parker and Castle Rock objected, suing the state over the new permitting language. They argued that the original volume estimates used to calculate their annual pumping rates were never meant as formal, total volume limits. Those limits, they argued, could sharply limit their future water supplies because they were essentially a best guess, based on measuring technology that has changed considerably since then.
Aurora and Greeley joined the case, siding with the state. A special water court ruled against Parker and Castle Rock, which together appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court. The high court is expected to issue a ruling in the case before the end of the year, according to spokeswoman Suzanne Karrer.
Under Colorado’s so-called 100-year rule, well owners can extract no more than 1% of the water under their lands each year, pumping all the water within 100 years of the issuance of their permits. But prior to use of the new permitting language, the total volume of water that could be taken out over the life of the permit was never explicitly stated on the permits themselves, though it was used to calculate the annual extraction rate.
State officials said they added the water volumes to ensure wells are regulated in a uniform way and that well owners are informed at the start of that 100-year clock how much actual water they can pump.
Deputy State Engineer Tracy Kosloff explained, via email. “If the amount pumped is less than the annual maximum, the length of time it takes to reach the total allowed withdrawal will be more than 100 years. For instance, if one pumps half of the maximum each year, it will take 200 years to reach the total.”
However, if the maximum allowed each year is pumped, then the permit will expire at the end of the 100 years, and the well owner would have to stop pumping and find other water sources, Kosloff said.
But Parker and Castle Rock argue that water levels in the aquifer vary and that over that 100-year period more water might actually be available to them. Establishing a lifetime limit, especially one based on an estimate and old measuring technology, could deprive them of water to which they are entitled.
Colorado designated groundwater basins.
Colorado is home to several aquifer formations, some of which can be easily recharged via rainfall and snowmelt, and are considered renewable. Others cannot be readily recharged and thus are considered to be nonrenewable. These are known as nontributary aquifers and wells drilled in these areas are at the heart of the dispute.
Sean Chambers, Greeley’s director of water and sewer utilities, supports water regulators’ effort to more closely manage nonrenewable underground supplies by including a specific volume on permits because it will better protect everyone over the long run.
Greeley is planning a major new aquifer storage facility on the Wyoming border known as the Terry Ranch. The city wants to ensure water it stores underground isn’t inadvertently tapped by other users whose pumping could siphon off the city’s supplies, Chambers said via email.
When it became clear in the 1980s and 1990s that the aquifers were in decline, Douglas County communities began reducing the amount of water they were taking out of the aquifers, adding surface supplies from the South Platte River and Cherry Creek, and building multimillion dollar water recycling plants so they can reuse the water they already own.
Parker once relied on nonrenewable groundwater for more than 90% of its supplies, but has since reduced that use to roughly 35%. By 2050, it hopes to drop that amount to 25% of its supplies, according to Ron Redd, manager of the Parker Water and Sanitation District.
Ultimately, Redd said, it’s likely that the state laws on the books now will have to be changed as a result of the dispute.
“If we lose, we will try to run legislation upholding our interpretation of the law,” he said. “We were surprised by this. No one knew it was coming until suddenly we saw this condition on our well permits.”
More by Jerd Smith. Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
Water treatment process in Greeley. Graphic via Greeley Water
The Northern Integrated Supply Project, currently estimated at $2 billion, would create two new reservoirs and a system of pipelines to capture more drinking water for 15 community water suppliers. An environmental group is now suing the Army Corps of Engineers over a key permit for Northern Water’s proposal. (Save the Poudre lawsuit, from Northern Water project pages)
The Colorado Court of Appeals rejected a lawsuit from environmentalists last week that sought to force Larimer County to reevaluate a massive northern Colorado water project, which would eventually supply 13 billion gallons of water to 15 Front Range communities. The Northern Integrated Supply Project would pump water from the Poudre River into two large reservoirs that would be built near Fort Collins and Greeley and would include dozens of miles of new pipelines and a major renovation of existing canals. The utility proposing the project, Northern Water, says it’s the only way to meet demand for an additional 500,000 customers it expects to serve by 2050…In promotional materials, Northern Water said the reservoir project would add water into the Poudre River during dry spells, and that the project would improve water quality in the river basin…
In 2019, Save the Poudre and No Pipe Dream, another advocacy organization, sued the Larimer County Board of Commissioners for approving a local permit for the project. The groups alleged that two commissioners were biased in favor of the project and that the permit — a critical step before construction — should be denied. In an Oct. 3 decision, the appeals court upheld a lower court decision and confirmed the permit was properly issued…The ruling inches the reservoir project one step closer to construction more than 20 years after it started in earnest. Northern Water first started planning for the project in the 1980s. It has already cleared significant hurdles, including approval from multiple state and county agencies and the federal government through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers…
The reservoir project may still require a local permit from Fort Collins, since part of its pipelines may cut through the city. For years, the city opposed the project because of its potential impact to wetlands and other natural features. In 2023, the city strengthened its approval process for large infrastructure works, which means it will have to be impartial when evaluating those permits. In July 2024, the city council formally rescinded its opposition to the project.
American beaver, he was happily sitting back and munching on something. and munching, and munching. By Steve from washington, dc, usa – American Beaver, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3963858
A beaver evangelist of sorts, Goldfarb has dived deep into the world of beavers in writing his 2018 book “Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter”. The volume explores the environmental consequences of losing the water-loving rodents that once inhabited lakes and rivers across the country at a population size between 100 to 200 million. Hunted for their fur, beavers were nearly extinct in North America by the late 1800s. The loss of their damming activities dramatically changed our landscapes, leading to the erosion of streams and the loss of wetlands and riparian habitat…While beaver populations are estimated to be only a tenth of what they once were, many projects are working to boost beaver populations including some locally in Park County. The rodents are even being revered as critical players in fighting complex environmental challenges including drought, flooding, wildfire, extinction and climate change. Some of these beavers have made their home at SCR, a 71-acre property owned and managed by the Mountain Area Land Trust (MALT) which hosts educational programming, high alpine research, publicly accessible walking trails and of course, beaver ponds. Hosted in collaboration with the local Mosquito Range Heritage Initiative, the evening’s beaver walk and talk with Goldfarb was well attended.
Goldfarb asked participants why the rodents can’t seem to get enough of creating wetlands, blocking streams and rivers with their signature dams to create wide still stretches of water.
“Beavers are tireless when it comes to repairing dams,” said Goldfarb. “If we tore some of those logs out and started to drain this pond, the beavers would be at that spot tonight.”
It didn’t take long to identify the need to create wetlands helps beavers protect themselves from predators like wolves, coyotes and mountain lions that would easily make a tasty treat out of a stay beaver. “They’re a fat, slow-moving meat packet,” said Goldfarb. With iron teeth that never stop growing, fur that traps air and a second set of lips, Goldfarb says if someone described a beaver, you probably wouldn’t think it was real.
The South Platte River Basin is shaded in yellow. Source: Tom Cech, One World One Water Center, Metropolitan State University of Denver.
Beer bottles are washed on a conveyor belt in a microbrewery. Less water used in the cleaning process is one way factories are trying to increase water savings. Photo by AETB
Denver-based Leprino Foods Company generates some of its own water. In fact, the company holds a water right for water developed at its Greeley manufacturing facility.
“We actually are contributing more water to the river than we take in from our municipal source,” says Erik Nielsen, associate general counsel at Leprino Foods, which is the world’s largest producer of mozzarella cheese and a global producer of whey protein and other dairy ingredients.
Leprino has been a net contributor to Colorado watersheds since at least 2017. In 2020, the company was granted a water right associated with the quantity of water that it conveys to the Poudre River after deducting the amount of water that it takes in from municipal sources.
Milk is about 87% water. The process of evaporating or concentrating milk products produces condensate of whey water. Leprino recovers this water and stores it on-site in silos, often reusing it multiple times. Later, it is cleaned to stream quality standards and discharged. This, in addition to other water efficiency and recovery projects, generates about 600 acre-feet per year, or enough water to supply around 1,000 homes for a year. Leprino licenses most of this byproduct water to the City of Greeley for municipal uses, says Nielsen.
These water-saving processes not only reduce the company’s environmental footprint but are also critical to Leprino’s manufacturing future in Colorado.
“It seems like you shouldn’t be doing business in Colorado if you’re not thinking really deeply about water,” says Nielsen. “You’ve probably heard the saying, you never think about the value of water until the well runs dry.”
Water is required for cooling, heating, washing, diluting and other processes at nearly 6,000 manufacturing facilities in Colorado. As historic droughts threaten water availability across the state, consumers increasingly demand water-smart practices, and inflation continues to squeeze the private sector, many manufacturers are shifting their approach to water use and conservation.
“Manufacturers are increasingly becoming good stewards of water,” says JC Ye, corporate business director of water reuse at Veolia, a global water services company. “Many have a strong incentive to implement water stewardship practices and invest in improving the reliability of water supply. In most industrial processes, disruption of water availability has an immediate, acute impact on manufacturing operations.”
But water is highly contextual. Every river and stream has a unique ecosystem and different needs depending on the season. Solutions to protect and restore these resources are just as complex. Companies are taking a variety of approaches to water stewardship, from investing millions in local conservation work to making small but impactful infrastructure upgrades.
The original Coors brewery was built in Golden specifically for Clear Creek’s remarkable water quality. The company has a history of conducting projects aimed at protecting this water, which ends up in its product. As a founding member of the Clear Creek Watershed Foundation, the Molson Coors Beverage Company has helped to clean up some of the estimated 1,600 orphaned mines in the watershed, which threaten water quality by overflowing and discharging heavy metals and mine drainage into the river.
These days, water stewardship is about both public perception and product quality: Consumer-facing brands like Coors know that they face a reputational risk if they don’t invest in water-use reduction and watershed protection.
“[People] need to have confidence that we are serious about our water use, that we’re serious about protecting the watershed,” says Ben Moline, director of water resources and environmental policy for Molson Coors Beverage Company.
The entire state of Colorado has experienced severe to extreme drought on and off for more than two decades. The public is watching water use more closely as resource scarcity becomes a more serious concern. Recently, some communities have pushed back against water consumption for manufacturing.
BlueTriton — the owner of major U.S. bottled water brands, including Poland Spring — has been embroiled in legal battles with water boards, environmentalists, and other activists across the country for years. The company pumps water from Colorado’s Upper Arkansas River Basin, a semi-arid region particularly impacted by historic drought. In July 2021, about 20 community members protested outside of the Chaffee County Courthouse, opposing the renewal of a permit that allows BlueTriton to export 65 million gallons of water per year. After negotiating more than $1.25 million in community contributions from BlueTriton, county commissioners approved the permit the following month.
Veolia found in a 2023 study that fewer than 30% of surveyed companies had set water conservation goals, with water lagging behind carbon and waste as the environmental priority for companies. But Ye notes a recent shift in the way companies approach sustainability. Water scarcity concerns, public pressure, reputational risk, and cost-saving opportunities are leading to the proliferation of water initiatives across the private sector.
Michael Kiparsky, founding director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, sees this as an opportunity: “Can we use transparency coupled with some degree of public awareness of water as a resource to put pressure on corporate entities to do something that might not be strictly in their economic interest otherwise?”
Small changes, big impact
The Coors brewery in Golden uses an estimated 2.7 billion gallons of water from Clear Creek each year: about 782 million gallons for its products, and 2 billion gallons for brewing processes, including production and malting. Of those 2 billion gallons of process water, 95% is cleaned and returned to Clear Creek.
This is representative of manufacturers at large: According to the Colorado Water Plan, industrial users account for only 3% of Colorado’s total annual water consumption, or water that is permanently removed from its source.
“We are diversion heavy, but depletion light,” says Moline, noting that Molson Coors is actively working to bring its water consumption rate even lower, while continuing to work with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) to ensure wastewater discharged back to Clear Creek after treatment meets permit requirements.
Molson Coors treats wastewater from its operations as well as much of the City of Golden’s wastewater. The company entered into a consent order with CDPHE earlier this year to address permit exceedences for total suspended solids, metals, oil and grease, and whole effluent toxicity in its discharge water. Even before the consent order, the brewery began upgrading its wastewater treatment plant in preparation for meeting tightening water quality limits. Water treatment improvements are big changes with big impact, but small infrastructure changes also lead to big results — for example, fermentation tank design.
A few times per month, depending on the type of beer, the brewing team empties each fermentation tank through a valve on its side, leaving a small amount of beer just below the valve’s opening. The team clears the excess beer and thoroughly cleans the floor of the tank to prepare for the next batch, using water and a squeegee multiple times over. Across more than 100 fermentation tanks of varying sizes, which produce approximately 9.7 million barrels of beer per year, a portion of beer is lost in the cleaning process.
Molson Coors Beverage Company is updating its fermentation tanks to a new, vertical design with a cone-shaped bottom, through which a valve completely empties the beer directly below the tank. Now, the brewery can produce the same number of barrels for less, because beer — and water — isn’t left on the tank floor. This means less water used for malting, heating and cooling beer that ultimately doesn’t make it to consumers, and less water used in the cleaning process.
The upgrades are a part of Molson Coors Beverage Company’s G150 project, in honor of the 150-year anniversary of the Coors brewery’s inception. The company has invested “several hundred million dollars” in the project, which is expected to save 80 million gallons of water annually after its completion by the end of 2024. Moline says that upgrading its fermentation tanks is contributing a large part of these water savings.
Other food and beverage manufacturers are updating infrastructure to save water: Swire Coca-Cola, which produces, sells, and distributes Coca-Cola and other beverages in 13 states across the American West, says that it installed a new filtration and recovery system at its Denver plant to reduce water usage by about 20%. And Bellvue-based Morning Fresh Dairy, a fifth-generation dairy farm that produces the nationally popular Noosa Yogurt brand, installed an automated clean-in-place system to clean the interior of food and beverage process pipes, reducing water consumption by 30%.
Corporate mandates
PepsiCo, Amazon, Google and Facebook have all committed to being water-positive, or replenishing more water than they use from natural systems, by 2030. In addition to water-efficiency projects, much of this work is done through cross-sector partnerships, which have provided critical support to local water stewardship efforts.
“Corporate support has been very important to our ability to staff project work and, even more so, to purchase water for streamflow restoration,” says Kate Ryan, executive director of the Colorado Water Trust.
For example, the tech giant Intel relies on the Colorado River and the Rio Grande to supply water downstream to its Arizona and New Mexico manufacturing facilities. The company has partnered with the Colorado Water Trust and Trout Unlimited on multiple projects to support the Colorado River watershed. Intel reports that 120% of the water it used across the U.S. in 2023 was either returned to the source or restored through investment in water stewardship projects.
The Colorado Water Trust has received more than $421,000 in corporate funding from companies like Intel, Coca-Cola, MCBC, Seltzer, and Niagara Cares, a philanthropic arm of Niagara Water, since 2019. This money, in addition to foundation funding, individual contributions, and water donations, has enabled the organization to lease well over 10,000 acre-feet of water, which would typically cost $400,000 to $2,500,000, depending on the water right, says Ryan. The projects improved flows on the 15-Mile Reach of the Colorado River — a critical stretch of river for endangered fish species near Grand Junction, Colorado — as well as on the Yampa River and tributaries to the Fraser River.
And while BlueTriton has received pushback from community members on its water use, the company has partnered with Colorado Parks and Wildlife to dedicate a conservation easement to preserve 122 acres of wildlife habitat and protect groundwater resources along the Arkansas River.
“These sustainability programs work well, and Western rivers would benefit from more of them,” says Ryan. “The amount of water they have made possible for streamflow restoration in recent years is significant.”
But experts agree that the pathway to meet water-positive goals, or even water-neutral goals, is not straightforward.
Context is key
A Colorado Water Trust project benefits the Little Cimarron River using a senior water right that keeps productive land irrigated in a split-season arrangement, where water is applied to fields in the first part of the season, then left in the river during later summer months when fish need it most. The trust also partners with corporations, such as Coca Cola, to secure funding for water conservation work. Courtesy Colorado Water Trust
“Being ‘water neutral’ in an honest way requires a great amount of thought and engagement with people who have direct interest or represent the interest of the communities and environment that might be affected,” says Kiparsky.
In 2023, the nonprofit Ceres published a benchmark analysis of 72 companies from four water-intensive industries — apparel, beverage, food, and high-tech — and found that only 35% consider contextual factors such as local watershed conditions, regulatory dynamics, and community water needs when assessing water use risks. Only 14% consider contextual factors when assessing water quality risks.
“[We] found that while many companies are setting goals aimed at using less water, most are not setting strong targets to reduce water pollution,” says Kirsten James, senior program director for water at Ceres. “We also noted a lack of commitment around protecting freshwater ecosystems and clean water supplies for communities.”
Where and when water is replenished makes a significant difference for water systems. Simply measuring the amount of water a company uses and returns to its source each year, for example, does not account for when that water was used or returned. If most water is pumped during the summer and returned during the winter, these activities could still be disruptive to wildlife, ecosystems, and overall river flow rates.
“Unlike in sustainability efforts involving carbon offsets, there is no single atmosphere to improve. Every river has different needs at different times of the year,” says Ryan.
Implementation of corporate water goals requires detailed reporting and independent validation to ensure the efforts are sustaining or restoring and not damaging ecosystems.
“It’s a simple concept, becoming water neutral, but putting it in practice is not simple,” says Kiparsky. “A lot of the implications are going to rely on analysis by third parties that are experts in understanding water impact.”
This year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) began requiring most public companies to disclose climate-related information, including water-related financial risks, so investors can consider how companies are managing climate risks when making investment decisions. James says this is an important step that will help raise the bar with U.S. companies on water-related disclosures.
“As water risk continues to escalate, investors and companies need full transparency to be able to manage and adapt to these threats,” says James.
Homes line the foothills outside Colorado Springs on Sept. 11, 2024. The city has doubled down on water conservation to make its recent spike in population growth possible. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
When researcher Brian Richter set out to take a close look at how big cities in the Western U.S. were adapting to water scarcity, he already knew the story’s basic contours.
Previous studies showed the trend clearly for some large utilities. As a megadrought has baked the Southwest since 2000, the region’s biggest cities have reined in their use to keep pace with the declining supply.
But it had been years since someone took a more region-wide look at who was conserving and how much. Richter, a lecturer at the University of Virginia, and president of his own independent research firm, Sustainable Waters, was up to the task.
After gathering data for 28 large and medium-size water utilities dependent on the Colorado River, Richter and his team were able to see the more modern trend lines in sharp detail. The results surprised him. It wasn’t just that cities like Denver, Los Angeles, Tucson and Las Vegas were using less. They were doing it while growing rapidly.
His 2023 study found that collectively the region’s cities had grown by 25% from 2000 to 2020, while their water use dropped by 18%. Per person use rates declined even more sharply, falling by 30%.
“We thought that was nothing short of miraculous, to be honest,” Richter said. “It’s quite a water conservation success story.”
Richter had heard the region’s growth anxieties before. As homes spring up, highways widen and new schools open, conversations about rising populations in the arid West eventually find their way to water. Those new residents mean more green lawns and household faucets, forcing cities to scramble to meet the new demand, or so the thinking goes.
It’s easy to understand why the notion that more people beget more water use jumps to people’s minds, Richter said. All of the on-the-ground impacts of growth are highly visible.
“What you can’t see so easily are the numbers, the water numbers behind that growth,” Richter said. “We felt it was really important to start getting those numbers out there, and to start revealing the fact that it’s not necessarily true any longer, that as a city’s population grows its water use has to increase at the same time.”
Now, as pressure from climate change mounts, the region faces a critical question: Can urban areas keep pace with their past successes in water conservation, or is there a floor to just how much water savings can be wrung from Southwestern cities?
The Colorado Springs skyline rises above Fountain Creek on Sept. 11, 2024. For the past couple decades the city has experienced rapid population growth while ratcheting down its demand for water. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
Using less in Colorado Springs
Until 2002, Colorado Springs was using water like there’s no tomorrow. As the city grew, so did its water demand, hand-in-hand.
“There was a lot of inefficiency out there, a lot of inefficient fixtures, a lot of landscape irrigation, primarily of turf grass,” said Scott Winter, Colorado Springs Utilities water conservation project manager. “A lot of it was, frankly, egregious.”
A punishing drought in 2002 provided a shock to the system. While reservoirs declined, the people in charge of Colorado Springs started to realize that unchecked water use would eventually lead to serious shortages. Mandatory restrictions on use at the city level ran from 2002 to 2005.
“I don’t think people thought of the water system, the water supply, as being constrained in any way until we hit 2002 and then our perspective changed on the scarcity of water and how reliable our supply was,” Winter said.
Conservation is now seen as a reliable way to live within their means, he said.
Scott Winter, Colorado Springs Utilities water conservation project manager, points out a turf grass conversion project on Sept. 11, 2024. The utility offers incentives to encourage homeowners and commercial businesses to swap lawns for native grasses. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
Colorado Springs has taken a gradual approach. First came the rate changes. Residents who irrigated more paid more per gallon. Then came the incentives to swap out indoor plumbing fixtures, such as replacing a toilet that uses 5 gallons per flush with a new model that uses less than 1.
The city has also begun to embrace the loss of its lawns. It ramped up its lawn replacement program, in which thirsty yards are replaced with native grasses, like blue grama or buffalo grass, which use 60%-80% less water. The utility offers 50 cents per square foot of lawn converted.
Since Colorado Springs started those conversions in 2013, the city has swapped in native grass on about 3.1 million square feet, or about 72 acres, mostly on commercial properties like shopping centers, churches and business parks. In 2020 a permanent shift to only allow for three days per week of outside watering on existing grass went into effect as well.
Blue grama grows alongside a Colorado Springs parkway on Sept. 11, 2024. Concerns over dwindling water supplies have sped up the city’s conversions of turf grass to blue grama and other native species. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
All of the focus on conservation is paying off, Winter said. From 2000 to 2023, Colorado Springs has grown by about 40%, while also recording a 39% reduction in average per capita water use and about a 25% drop in total water deliveries. The city’s water use is now about equal to what it was in the late 1980s, despite the rapid growth, he said.
Mandatory conservation measures have started taking hold in some parts of the Colorado River Basin, like a nonfunctional turf ban in Las Vegas, for example. But Winter said the cultural and political contours of Colorado Springs mean water managers have to get creative, relying more on voluntary incentives than strict mandates that could rile its conservative voter base.
When the city decided to overhaul its building code a few years ago, the process brought up the usual tensions over growth. One code change ruffled feathers. A restriction on new developments limited turf to 25% of the total landscape.
“Individual freedom is a core value here,” said Nancy Henjum, a Colorado Springs city council member. Henjum summarized the early complaints of some fellow council members: “What do you mean I wouldn’t be able to have Kentucky bluegrass in my whole yard?”
But after lengthy discussions, plus field trips to the infrastructure that brings Colorado River basin water over the mountains to Colorado Springs, lightbulbs went off for the city council members about the scarce nature of their supply, she said. As of June 2023, the turf restriction is now officially part of the city’s landscape code.
“It was ultimately fascinating to watch people who are policymakers kind of push back initially, and then little by little over time recognize this is the right thing to do,” Henjum said.
A sign indicates where to find low water use plants in Colorado Springs Utilities demonstration garden on Sept. 11, 2024. A punishing drought in 2002 reframed the way the community saw its reliance on the shrinking Colorado River. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
Conserving the way out
While city leaders are proud of the water conservation success they’ve had over the past two decades, they say that was the easy part. In Colorado Springs, another 40% reduction in use over the next few decades will be tough, if not impossible, Winter said.
“Used to be that we could put a conservation program out there and anyone could participate. Almost everyone was inefficient, and so you could just broadcast a program out there and it worked,” he said. “It’s getting harder, it’s getting more expensive. We’re having to get a lot more strategic and targeted in our approach.”
The same is true just to the north, in Aurora. The city grew by 40% from 2000 to 2020, while lowering both its total water use and per-person use, according to Richter’s study.
“We are the first city (in Colorado) to pass a turf ban,” said Alex Davis, assistant general manager for Aurora Water. “Fifty percent of our use is outdoor water use in the summer, and we’re trying to ratchet that down.”
A path winds through the Colorado Springs Utilities demonstration garden on Sept. 11, 2024. Because of gradual water conservation measures the city has been able to add thousands of new residents while using less water from the Colorado River basin. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)
But Davis isn’t convinced a city like Aurora, with its steep population curve, can rely solely on conservation to make its way toward a stable water future.
“When we look at our demand projections going forward, we have a gap that we need to fill, right?” she said. “We have a projected need that we can’t meet today for what we expect the population to be in 2060, and so we have to acquire more water resources and do more supply projects in order to meet that gap.”
A big portion of that gap is being driven by climate change, Davis said. Longer, hotter dry spells mean the uncertainty about future water supplies is greater than it was 20 years ago. Her team uses models to game out what kinds of policies the city might need to make it through extreme droughts.
Under those severe scenarios, Aurora’s plans indicate it would first cut down on outdoor watering, then eliminate it all together. That would leave just indoor, household use, but Davis said, “there are projections where we don’t have enough water to meet household use only in these very severe projected scenarios.”
John Fleck, a University of New Mexico water policy professor, said this is the challenging future facing many of the West’s municipal water leaders. Even so, he cautioned against too much hand-wringing over population growth and urban water use. There’s still a lot of slack in the system and a lot more savings to be had, he said.
Because so much water is used outdoors, Western cities face a fundamental question: As the region warms and dries, how much green space are they willing to part with to close the gap between supply and demand? It’ll be a tough call, but not an impossible one, Fleck said.
“When you think deeply about it, it would be weird for people, for communities, not to take the necessary steps to ensure their future existence, right?” he said.
“If you’re facing the choice of getting rid of some swimming pools and lawns, or abandoning your city, it’s a no-brainer. People are going to use less water. And that’s what we see happen over and over again.”
This story is part of a series on water myths and misconceptions, produced by KUNC, The Colorado Sun, Aspen Journalism, Fresh Water News and The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Mrs. Gulch’s landscape September 12, 2024. Blue Gramma in the far left corner of the photo.
The Soldier Canyon Dam is located on the east shore of Horsetooth Reservoir, 3.5 miles west of Fort Collins, Colorado. The zoned earthfill dam has an outlet works consisting of a concrete conduit through the base of the dam, controlled by two 72-inch hollow-jet valves. The foundation is limey shales and sandstones overlain with silty, sandy clay. Photo credit Reclamation.
Nearly 150,000 residents will have greater access to safe drinking water without high costs for decades to come, after an approval by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE). This authorization will increase capacity at the Soldier Canyon Water Treatment Plant from 60 to 68 million gallons per day (MGD).
“The approval from CDPHE is a big win and a huge savings in dollars for the Tri-Districts all operating from the Soldier Canyon Water Treatment Authority’s Plant,” says Eric Reckentine, General Manager of North Weld County Water District.
The re-rating by the CDPHE which increases capacity from 60 to 68 million gallons per day (MGD), was successfully accomplished by the collective work of the three water districts operating out of Northern Colorado – North Weld County Water District (NWCWD), East Larimer County Water District (ELCO), and the Fort Collins-Loveland Water District (FCLWD).
“The expansion ensures that we can continue to provide water supplies to match our customers’ future growth needs and provide added resilience to our water supply systems,” states Mark Kempton, P.E, CWP, General Manager of Soldier Canyon Water Treatment Authority. “The Authority achieved the 8 MGD expansion using the Plant’s existing facilities, resulting in no construction and minimal costs. This efficiency has allowed us to keep our water rates low for our customers while continuing to provide a reliable, safe, and affordable drinking water supply to the Tri-Districts.”
The CDPHE expansion will provide water and larger capacity many years into the future for the tremendous development and population growth that Northern Colorado towns are experiencing.
“We continue to see projections for additional growth in the northern Colorado region and expanding water treatment capacity is a fundamental building block to sustain that growth. This treatment capacity increase represents the most cost-effective expansion in Soldier Canyon’s history and ensures all three partners can continue delivering high-quality drinking water well into the future,” explains Chris Pletcher, P.E., General Manager of Fort Collins – Loveland Water District.
“Like much of Northern Colorado, we anticipate continued growth within the East Larimer County Water District (ELCO) service area, and this addition of water treatment capacity will aid in meeting that new demand,” states Mike Scheid, General Manager of ELCO.
“I am very proud of the work of the other water districts and the staff and board of North Weld County Water District for helping to make accomplishments like this happen – it further stands by our commitment that we follow-through on what we promise for our customers,” says Reckentine. “This collaborative undertaking between the districts ensures we have secured the highest quality treated water for our Northern Colorado customers today, tomorrow, and into the future.”
ABOUT THE SOLDIER CANYON WATER TREATMENT AUTHORITY:
The Soldier Canyon Water Treatment Authority (SCWTA) owns and operates the Soldier Canyon Filter Plant, which is a 68 million gallon per day (MGD) conventional water treatment plant located in Fort Collins, CO. Since 1961, the Authority has provided high quality, reliable, safe, and affordable drinking water to over 145,000 people living in three water districts and adjacent communities in the Northern Colorado region. The three water districts (Tri-Districts) are:
Jasper Reservoir, in the Indian Peaks Wilderness Area in Western Boulder County, has been sold under a set of covenants will ensure it waters are available to Middle Boulder Creek during the fall, when it is driest. Courtesy: The Colorado Water Trust
Ten years ago, an anonymous benefactor approached the Colorado Water Trust intent on providing it with an interesting gift: a reservoir high in the forests of the Indian Peaks Wilderness Area in western Boulder County.
The 23-year-old nonprofit was thrilled, understanding that the ultimate sale of the gift would insure its financial future, and making sure its mission to keep water in rivers continues.
The trust set to work immediately looking for a buyer who would agree to some very tough restrictions: permanent public access for fishing, hunting and camping, keeping the tiny reservoir full during the summer, and releasing the water down through Barker Reservoir in Nederland into Middle Boulder Creek during the fall, when the 37-mile stream segment is driest. Equally important is a conservation easement that prohibits any development of the water and land around the reservoir.
“The covenants are quite strict,” said Kate Ryan, the trust’s executive director. “We’ve taken away the development potential of the reservoir, so we had to have the right person come along.”
The trust’s day job is to connect private water-right owners with threatened streams, helping set up financing and the legal agreements necessary to ensure the water can be transferred to the state, where it becomes part of the state’s environmental program leaving water in streams that would otherwise be diverted.
Jasper Reservoir/Boulder Creek. Credit: Colorado Water Trust
If that sounds like a tall order, it often is. And finding a buyer for this reservoir would prove equally daunting. It turns out there aren’t a lot of people interested in buying covenant-restricted reservoirs, even in a water-short state such as Colorado.
But in August, the trust and Boulder County’s Tiefel family finalized the deal.
“The trust wanted a partner to help manage the reservoir and run the water down Boulder Creek,” said Doug Tiefel, a real estate developer whose family farms in eastern Boulder County and also has a small reservoir of its own. The family uses its reservoir to irrigate its operations and it leases any excess water to other growers in the area when water is available.
Tiefel said the Jasper Reservoir deal fit his family’s water needs, and their environmental ethic.
“For the ecosystem it is critical to keep more water in the river in late summer and early fall, and that’s why we forged this partnership agreement,” Tiefel said.
Prior to the sale, the reservoir’s water was often leased to other entities, such as the City of Boulder, which would in turn lease it to growers east of town. But the reservoir was managed differently every year. Under the Tiefel’s management plan, the water will flow more consistently, providing Middle Boulder Creek more certainty than it has had in the past, and a continuing supply of water for growers, Tiefel said.
Kim Hutton, the City of Boulder’s senior water resources manager, said the sale is a step forward for the entire Boulder Creek watershed, especially as climate change continues to reduce stream flows.
“The benefit of this sale is to release water when stream flow is low, and that is complementary to what we’re doing,” said Hutton, referring to the city’s efforts to keep water in the creek system.
Ryan hopes the deal will be the first of many in Colorado in which permanent protective easements can be placed on water. She said she’s also grateful for the financial security it provides the nonprofit.
“The revenue gives us the certainty for years to come that we will be able to add water back into Colorado’s rivers and streams,” she said.
The Colorado River flows through the Shoshone diversion structure on Jan. 29, 2024. Northern Water, which supplies cities and farms on the Front Range, is asking for more data about how much water will stay on the Western Slope after the Colorado River District purchases rights to the water that flows through Shoshone. Photo credit: Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
September 11, 2024
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
A Front Range water distributor is pushing back on a planned transfer of rights to water from the Colorado River. It has led to a disagreement between two major water agencies — a minor flare-up of longstanding tensions between Eastern Colorado and Western Colorado, which have anxiously monitored each others’ water usage for decades.
Northern Water, which serves cities and farms from Fort Collins to Broomfield, is asking for more data about the future of the Shoshone water right. Meanwhile, the Colorado River District, a powerful taxpayer-funded agency founded to keep water flowing to the cities and farms of Western Colorado, says Northern Water may be attempting to stymie its purchase of the water rights.
In early 2024, The Colorado River District announced it would spend nearly $100 million to buy rights to the water that flows through the Shoshone power plant, near Glenwood Springs. Shoshone’s water right is one of the oldest and biggest in the state, giving it preemptive power over many other rights in Colorado.
Shoshone Falls hydroelectric generation station via USGenWeb
Even in dry times, when water shortages hit other parts of the state, the Shoshone power plant can send water through its turbines. And when that water exits the turbines and re-enters the Colorado River, it keeps flowing for a variety of users downstream.
Since that announcement, the river district has rallied more than $15 million from Western Colorado cities and counties that could stand to benefit from the water right changing hands. Those governments are dishing out taxpayer money in hopes of helping make sure that water stays flowing to their region, even if demand for water goes up in other parts of the state.
The river district plans to leave Shoshone’s water flowing through the Colorado River. It’s an effort to help settle Western Colorado’s long-held anxieties over competition with the water needs of the Front Range, where fast-growing cities and suburbs around Denver need more water to keep pace with development.
The water right is classified as “non-consumptive,” meaning every drop that enters the power plant is returned to the river. The river district wants to ensure the water that flows into the hydroelectric plant also flows downstream to farmers, fish and homes. The agency plans to buy rights to Shoshone’s water and lease it back to the power company, Xcel Energy, as long as Xcel wants to keep producing hydropower.
Almost all of the $98.5 million for the river district’s purchase of Shoshone’s water will come from public funds. In addition to money from its own coffers and Western Colorado governments, the river district also plans to apply for federal funding to pay for its purchase of Shoshone’s water. It is planning to seek $40 million from the Inflation Reduction Act.
Despite decades-long tensions between water users on the Western Slope and the Front Range, leaders on the East side of the mountains have stayed mostly quiet about the Shoshone transfer.
Bicycling the Colorado National Monument, Grand Valley in the distance via Colorado.com
Northern Water’s recent statements about Shoshone perhaps mark the most notable public pushback to the pending deal. The agency supplies water to Front Range cities such as Loveland and Greeley, as well as farms along the South Platte River all the way to the Nebraska border.
The agency outlined its concerns in a letter to elected representatives, including Colorado Senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper and congresspeople Joe Neguse, Lauren Boebert, Yadira Caraveo and Greg Lopez.
In short, Northern said it supports the concept of the transfer, but wants an independent study of how much water the Colorado River District plans to send down the river each year.
“We want to make sure that we’re all going into this with the same data to make sure that everyone’s interests are being addressed,” said Jeff Stahla, Northern Water spokesman.
Northern posits that the Western Slope could pull more water than the amount that has been historically used by Shoshone – enough to increase strain on upstream reservoirs that also supply the Front Range.
The River District calls that claim a “gross mischaracterization” of its plans.
“Their points ignore the stated intent of the effort and are counter to the stated values,” said Matthew Aboussie, a spokesman for the River District, “And they 100% know that.”
The River District published its own letter about the matter. The agency’s director said Northern Water’s efforts “were received as intentional obstacles intended to threaten the viability of the Shoshone Permanency Project,” and said Northern’s calls for more data collection could require a time-intensive study of the project and tie it up in litigation for up to a decade.
“We are not looking to change the historic flows,” Aboussie said. “So the intention is to protect the status quo.”
The River District is currently compiling data about the history and future of the Shoshone water right and plans to present it in Colorado’s water court, which is part of the state’s normal process to approve the transfer or sale of water rights.
Screenshot from the Highland Ditch Company website.
Here’s the release from the St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District (Sean Cronin):
September 9, 2024
LONGMONT, COLO – This fall, the St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District (“District”) and the Highland Ditch Company are collaborating on a unique pilot project to save fish in St. Vrain Creek. As ditch diversions are closed off for the fall, fish often become trapped in standing pools behind the headgates, which eventually dry up. The pilot project will rescue these fish and return them to the adjacent creek, protecting local fish populations and aligning with the community’s values of environmental stewardship.
Healthy fisheries are essential not only for the ecological health of local streams but also for supporting the recreational fishing economy—well worth the half days’ work it will take to move the fish back into the creek.
“The District and Highland are piloting this salvage effort, in the hopes that the results may be scaled up across the District, and potentially in other parts of Colorado,” said the District’s Watershed Program Manager Jenny McCarty.
Highland Ditch Company, which has been diverting water for over a century, sees this initiative as an example of the symbiotic relationship that can exist between local agriculture and environmental health.
The channel’s water “is used to irrigate 35,000 agriculture acres in this valley. Those farms are part of the fabric of this community… residents eat food from [these] farms,” said Wade Gonzales, Highland’s Ditch and Reservoir Superintendent. “We are all connected, and this pilot project will show how we can work together toward common goals.”
“Our constituents across the St. Vrain and Left Hand Valley have time and again supported approaches that balance water needs for thriving agriculture and a healthy environment”, said Sean Cronin, the District’s Executive Director. “We’re honored to be a trusted partner to Highland in leading this effort.”
Media are invited to the fish salvage effort in late September, 2024. Date to be determined. Please email jenny.mccarty@svlh.gov if you are interested in attending.
About the St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District
The St. Vrain and Left Hand Water Conservancy District, created in 1971, is a local government, non -profit agency that serves Longmont and the surrounding land area. The District is dedicated to safeguarding water resources for all and promotes/partners on local water protection and management strategies that align with the five pillars of its Water Plan. Learn more at http://www.svlh.gov.
About the Highland Ditch Company
The Highland Ditch Company, based in Longmont, CO, was established in 1871 and irrigates about 35,000 acres of land along St. Vrain Creek, the most of any within District boundaries. The Highland Ditch Company pursues its mission to manage and deliver water for its shareholders by embracing innovative opportunities. Learn more at http://www.highlandditch.com.
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Elise Schmelzer and Joe Rubino). Here’s an excerpt:
September 8, 2024
…after decades of revitalization and efforts to stabilize flows, sections of the urban South Platte still smell of decay and waste, and city officials discourage swimming. But cyclists also pedal along miles of paved trails on the riverfront. Kayakers and surfers play in the whitewater. Carp and trout lurk under bridges, while families of ducks paddle along the calmer waters. And strips of green parks border long stretches of the river where, in previous decades, factories spewed sludge and landfills leached pollutants. After a long era of neglect and abuse, city officials, nonprofit leaders and developers hope to build on that progress as they pose a question for the future: How can we turn the city toward the river — the waterway that made Denver’s existence on the High Plains possible — instead of putting it at our backs and ignoring it? More than a quarter of a billion federal dollars are flowing into ecosystem restoration and flood management along the South Platte. For the first time, the Denver City Council recently created a committee dedicated to issues on and development near the river…
Developers plan to invest hundreds of millions of dollars along the river in coming years, building as much as 15 million square feet of combined new residential and commercial space on the land where Elitch Gardens Theme and Water Park sits today. If completed, that square footage will be nearly five times larger than Denver International Airport’s terminal building. Should that and other ambitious projects reach their full potential, the Platte would serve as a focal point of brand new high-rise urban neighborhoods that expand the city’s skyline in a new direction…Property owners ranging from the Denver Housing Authority to Stan Kroenke, the billionaire owner of the Colorado Avalanche and Denver Nuggets, to the city itself will all play roles in determining how new construction capitalizes on a restored South Platte. The impending turnover of underutilized and unappreciated land has generated buzz and a glut of glossy renderings. At the same time, it’s inducing heartburn in some corners of the city that have seen new investment like that drive gentrification in nearby low-income and minority neighborhoods.
Still, establishing the river as an asset rather than a barrier to urban growth is a sea change that veteran Denver city-builders like architect Chris Shears have hoped for decades would come. His firm, Shears Adkins Rockmore, has its hands in nearly every landscape-shifting project being contemplated near the South Platte today. The plans include transforming the vast parking lots around Empower Field and Ball Arena into new mixed-use neighborhoods.
Jasper Reservoir from dam. Photo credit: Colorado Water Trust
Here’s the release from the Colorado Water Trust (Kate Ryan and Doug Tiefel):
August 30, 2024
The Boulder Creek watershed is set to receive a vital boost in streamflow thanks to landmark water-sharing agreement facilitated by Colorado Water Trust. This agreement will support wildlife, ecosystems, and recreation during the driest months of the year in perpetuity.
Beginning this fall, water from Jasper Reservoir, located high in the Indian Peaks Wilderness above Nederland, will boost flows in 37 miles of Boulder Creek and its tributaries before being reused below the City of Boulder to help sustain local agriculture. This unique water-sharing agreement is the result of a generous donation of Jasper Reservoir by an anonymous donor to Colorado Water Trust and a subsequent transfer to 37-Mile LLC. The strategic release of water from Jasper Reservoir promises substantial environmental and community benefits for the Boulder Creek watershed and its residents and highlights the potential for collaborative multi-benefit solutions to enhance water resources and protect vital ecosystems in the face of climate change and ongoing development pressures.
On August 29, Colorado Water Trust accepted the donation of Jasper Reservoir in the Indian Peaks Wilderness Area from an anonymous donor. Executing on several years of careful planning, Colorado Water Trust immediately conveyed the reservoir to Doug Tiefel of 37-Mile LLC with a set of restrictive covenants that permanently protects public access to Jasper Reservoir and optimizes the environmental benefits of Jasper Reservoir water in the Boulder Creek system.
Jasper Reservoir/Boulder Creek. Credit: Colorado Water Trust
This fall, 37-Mile LLC will begin releasing water from Jasper Reservoir into the Boulder Creek system. In most years, late summer and fall are the periods in which Boulder County streamflow drops, and aquatic ecosystems benefit from boosted flows. Water released from Jasper Reservoir will be protected for 37 miles from Jasper Reservoir through the streams that traverse the Indian Peaks Wilderness, the Towns of Eldora and Nederland, and the entirety of Boulder Canyon. This project was several years in the making and showcases the opportunity for cross-industry collaborations that protect our precious Colorado resource from development and keep our water in our rivers through reaches of creeks and rivers in need of boosted flows.
Project History and Backstory:
The beautiful Jasper Reservoir located deep in the Indian Peaks Wilderness was built in 1896. It is a valuable source of water for the Boulder Creek watershed, a popular camping and fishing destination and provides sustenance for wildlife in the region. Its protection is vital to the environment and local rivers, from Jasper Creek in the mountain headwaters, all the way down Boulder Canyon. In late summer and early fall, when temperatures are hottest and streamflow drops low, Jasper Reservoir will help prop streamflows back up.
In 1890, nearly a century before Congress designated the Indian Peaks Wilderness as a part of the nation’s Wilderness Preservation system, the Boulder High Line Canal Company constructed Jasper Reservoir. Irrigation companies and the Colorado Power Company operated the reservoir over the next century.
Since the 1980s, Jasper Reservoir has been in a series of private ownerships, having been bought and sold multiple times. In recent years, the City of Boulder leased Jasper Reservoir water from private owners and provided that water to various Boulder County irrigators. During that time, Colorado Water Trust worked with the owners of Jasper Reservoir to craft a plan for its use for environmental improvements and public benefit. As these conversations progressed, the owners generously offered Jasper Reservoir as a donation to Colorado Water Trust.
The nonprofit then sought out a steward for the reservoir with both the capacity and knowledge necessary to manage and maintain the reservoir’s infrastructure. Additionally, Colorado Water Trust sought a partner with a desire to uphold the environmental and community values vital to operating Jasper Reservoir in a way that complements the mission of Colorado Water Trust. Luckily, the nonprofit found such a willing steward and partner in the Tiefel Family.
The Tiefel Family, long-time residents of Colorado, have a deep-rooted connection to the state’s natural landscapes and water resources. Known for their unwavering commitment to environmental preservation, the Tiefel Family has dedicated themselves to protecting Colorado’s vital water ecosystems.
Jasper Creek. Photo credit: Colorado Water Trust
With a passion for ensuring that future generations can enjoy the natural beauty of Boulder Creek and its surrounding areas, the Tiefel Family established 37-Mile LLC. Named after the length of the protected streamflow, 37-Mile LLC is a testament to their mission of safeguarding the region’s water resources from development pressures while promoting sustainable agricultural and irrigation practices.
With the support of the Tiefel Family and 37-Mile LLC, Colorado Water Trust made an arrangement that benefits all involved. After Colorado Water Trust accepted the reservoir donation, 37-Mile LLC entered into a purchase agreement to acquire the reservoir subject to a set of restrictive covenants that will permanently protect public access to the reservoir and ensure that water released from Jasper Reservoir will continue to provide environmental benefits well into the future.
As an additional benefit, once the water has traveled through Boulder Canyon and on to the plains, agricultural producers can then use the water downstream.
Why This Project is Important and Novel:
Colorado Water Trust’s permanent protections safeguard this wetland that provides invaluable wildlife habitat and will remain forever accessible to the public for camping and fishing. The water will continue to improve Boulder Creek streamflow during the driest months of the year. It’s a multi-benefit solution, which is Colorado Water Trust’s trademark, because it supports local water users, protects the environment and ensures all people can continue to enjoy the beauty of the area. The transaction also helps Colorado Water Trust, a small but mighty statewide nonprofit organization, in its mission to restore water to Colorado’s rivers.
Transactions and sales of water occur regularly throughout the state of Colorado. Certain types of water users have outsized purchasing power, which frequently results in water being transferred without much thought to the water’s role in supporting local river environments and community assets. Similar to how land trusts purchase and protect land through conservation easements, Colorado Water Trust is taking a public-interest approach on water-market transactions to protect rivers and streams in Colorado.
This project involving Jasper Reservoir and its water rights is a new concept in water, one that Colorado Water Trust hopes to replicate many times in the future. The biggest challenge is financial, as these are market-based transactions and Colorado Water Trust must make competitive offers to be able to acquire permanent public access, remove development potential, and safeguard environmental benefits.
Luckily, the anonymous donor in this transaction wanted to donate the reservoir and see its water protected, and the Tiefel Family was willing to forego development potential as the new steward of Jasper Reservoir. Their primary interests include securing environmental protections for the reservoir and Boulder Creek system and keeping water in agriculture to avoid “buy and dry” on the Front Range.
Colorado Water Trust is proud to have led the way on this innovative solution to protect our rivers and hopes to participate in more projects like this in the future.
QUOTE FROM COLORADO WATER TRUST:
“The last twenty-five years of my life have been ever so special, with countless hiking and fishing trips up to Jasper and in Boulder Canyon. Colorado Water Trust’s work will ensure that my loved-ones and our growing community continue to enjoy Jasper’s epic summer views and that we can save streamflow in the Boulder Creek watershed, all the way from the mountains to the City of Boulder.” -Kate Ryan, Colorado Water Trust
QUOTE FROM DOUG TIEFEL:
“Our stewardship of Jasper Reservoir aligns with our broader vision of environmental conservation and community enrichment. The family is honored to partner with the Colorado Water Trust to ensure that the reservoir’s water continues to benefit the local ecosystems and communities, reinforcing our legacy of environmental responsibility.” -Doug Tiefel, 37-Mile LLC
Denver’s City Ditch is celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2017. Learn about the Ditch’s important role in Denver’s history and how Denver Water helps out.
August 14, 2024
Long before Denver was established, residents of the area drank water directly from the South Platte River and Cherry Creek.
But the surface wells and buckets of water used as a delivery system were not an adequate means of providing the one thing these early travelers needed for survival: water. Irrigation ditches were the next step forward for the growing population spurred by the city’s Gold Rush of 1859.
But the surface wells and buckets of water used as a delivery system were not an adequate means of providing the one thing these early travelers needed for survival: water. Irrigation ditches were the next step forward for the growing population spurred by the city’s Gold Rush of 1859.
Crews work on City Ditch in this 1935 photo. Photo credit: Denver Water
“City Ditch first started flowing in 1867,” said Sarah McCarthy, Washington Park community member. “It’s a huge part of the Denver community.”
City Ditch was the vision of the Capitol Hydraulic Company, which saw an opportunity to bring more water to Denver from the South Platte River system, explained Holly Geist, Denver Water’s records management analyst.
“The Kansas Territorial Legislature allowed the company to build a ditch and use water for agricultural, mining, mechanical and city purposes,” Geist said.
The company’s first attempt to build the ditch failed in the early 1860s in part because the slope wasn’t high enough for water to flow to Denver.
According to Geist, surveyor and engineer Richard Little — the man for whom Littleton is named — was brought in to build a new flow path for the ditch that was farther up the river, closer to Waterton Canyon. Businessman John W. Smith was brought in to complete building the ditch and water began flowing into the city in 1867.
“There really was nothing in the area but scrub where Washington Park is today,” McCarthy said. “The ditch brought water for farms and homes and helped transform City and Washington parks into the urban gardens they are today.”
The city of Denver took control of the ditch in 1875, and by 1898 nearly all of the ditch within city limits had been placed in pipes. Denver Water acquired the ditch in 1918.
Community members “christen the monument with water balloons” during a celebration at Washington Park in Denver on Aug. 12, for the 150th anniversary of City Ditch. Photo credit: Denver Water
City Ditch continues to flow today, but in two sections. The southern section is managed by the city of Englewood and the northern section by Denver Water.
Denver Water’s portion of the open ditch can still be found flowing through Denver’s Washington Park. City Ditch’s primary function now is to irrigate and fill the lakes in Washington and City parks.
In an effort to conserve more river water supplies, Denver Water began using water from its Recycling Plant in 2004 for the northern section of the ditch. Stormwater also flows through it. Washington Park and the open section of City Ditch were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and designated a Denver Landmark in 1977.
McCarthy hopes people will visit a monument at Washington Park that honors John W. Smith and the people who helped build City Ditch. The monument is located south of the playground near Smith Lake.
“If John W. Smith were here today, he’d be very proud that City Ditch is still supplying water that’s vital to our community,” McCarthy said. “We hope the anniversary raises awareness about the ditch and its history and increases our community’s pride in the city.”
The Central Arizona Project canal passes alfalfa fields and feedlots in La Paz County, Arizona. The fields are irrigated with pumped groundwater, not CAP water. Source: Google Earth.
Imagine that you’ve set off for a hike in the desert of western Arizona, hoping to get up high so you can get a view of the juxtaposition of alfalfa fields against the sere, rocky earth. But you somehow get disoriented, the sun reaches its apex and beats down on you, the temperature climbing into the triple digits. The ground temperature becomes so hot you can feel it through the soles of your Hoka running shoes. Your water bottle is empty. Feeling certain you are going to die you pick a direction and stagger in as straight a line as you can manage, rasping for help. And then, just when you’re about to curl up under a rock and surrender, you see, coming straight out of a hillside, a virtual river. It must be a mirage, you think, or a hallucination, you run toward it, climb the fence, and dive into the cool, deep water.
This is not a fantasy scenario. There is, in fact, a place in the western Arizona desert where a lost traveler could stumble upon a giant canal emerging from the earth.
The Central Arizona Project’s Mark Wilmer pumping plant at Lake Havasu. The 14 plants on the CAP system push water across more than 300 miles with a vertical gain of 3,000 feet. Moving water requires enormous amounts of power, making the CAP the state’s largest single electricity user, with annual power bills totaling $60 million to $80 million. Source: Google Earth.
Central Arizona Project canal daylighting at the Buckskin Mountain Tunnel. Source: Google Earth
The outlet of the San Juan Chama Project runs into Willow Creek west of Los Ojos before running into Heron Lake. Source: Google Earth
The Rio Blanco intake for the San Juan-Chama Project, which takes water from three upper San Juan River tributaries and ships it across the Continental Divide to the Chama River watershed and, ultimately, the Rio Grande. Source: Google Earth
It’s just one of the crazy plumbing projects along the Colorado River and its tributaries. And they can look pretty weird when you stumble upon them in remote places. That’s what happened to me the other day — virtually. I was using Google Earth to chart the 1776 Escalante-Dominguez expedition’s path when, near Chama, I came across a large volume of water emanating from an arid meadow. After some thought I realized it was the outlet for the San Juan-Chama Project that diverts about 90,000 acre-feet of water annually from three tributaries of the San Juan River, sends it through the Continental Divide via a tunnel, and delivers it to Willow Creek and Heron Reservoir. From there it can be released into the Chama River, which runs into the Rio Grande, which is used by Albuquerque and Santa Fe to supplement groundwater and the shrinking Rio Grande.
The Big Thompson Project sucks water out of the Colorado River near its headwaters and siphons it through the mountains via the Alva Adams Tunnel. The water feeds reservoirs that feed Front Range cities and is used to generate hydropower. Adams tunnel inlet at Grand Lake. Source: Google Earth
The Big Thompson Project sucks water out of the Colorado River near its headwaters and siphons it through the mountains via the Alva Adams Tunnel. The water feeds reservoirs that feed Front Range cities and is used to generate hydropower. Penstocks and powerplant at Flatiron reservoir on the right. Source: Google Earth
These things aren’t only unsettling in a visual way, but in a conceptual way as well. One would expect cities and agricultural zones to rise up around where the water is and to grow according to how much water is locally available. Instead, cities rise up in places of limited water and grow as if there were no limits, importing water (and power and other resources) from far away.
The Julian Hinds pumping station, near Desert Center, California, lifts water from the Colorado River Aqueduct 441 feet as it makes its way toward Los Angeles. Source: Google Earth
The Southern Nevada Water Authority was forced to build a third water intake from Lake Mead that was able to draw water as the reservoir continued to shrink. The pumping plant is pictured. Source: Google Earth
Coal fired plant near Hayden with the Yampa River 2015. Photo credit: Ken Nuebecker
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
August 17, 2024
Will there be a water bonus as we close coal plants? In the short term, yes. It’s harder to say in the long term. Here’s why.
Use it or lose it. That’s a basic premise of Colorado water law. Those with water rights must put the water to beneficial use or risk losing the rights to somebody who can. It’s fundamentally anti-speculative. But Colorado legislators this year created a major exception for two electric utilities that draw water from the Yampa River for coal-burning power plants. They did so through Senate Bill 24-197, which Gov. Jared Polis signed into law in Steamboat Springs in late May.
The two utilities, Xcel Energy and Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, plan to retire the five coal-burning units — two at Hayden and three at Craig — they operate in the Yampa River Basin by late 2028. These units represent Colorado’s largest concentration of coal plants, 1,874 megawatts of generating capacity altogether. That’s 40% of Colorado’s total coal-fired electrical generation. Together, they use some 19,000 acre-feet of water each year.
What will become of those water rights when the turbines cease to spin? And what will replace that power? The short answer is that the utilities don’t know. That’s the point of the legislation. It gives the utilities until 2050 to figure out their future.
While the legislation is unique to the Yampa Valley, questions of future water use echo across Colorado as its coal plants — two units at Pueblo, one near Colorado Springs, one north of Fort Collins, and one at Brush — all will close or be converted to natural gas by the end of 2030.
This story was originally published in the July 2024 issue of Headwaters Magazine. Photo above of the Hayden Generating Station and the Yampa River was taken by Ken Neubecker in spring 2015. All other photos by Allen Best unless otherwise noted.
Both Xcel and Tri-State expect that at least 70% of the electricity they deliver in 2030 will come from wind and solar. The final stretch to 100%? That’s the hard question facing utilities across Colorado — and the nation and world.
Natural gas is expected to play a continued role as backup to the intermittency of renewables. Moving completely beyond fossil fuels? No one technology or even a suite of technologies has yet emerged as cost-effective. At least some of the technologies that Xcel and Tri-State are looking at involve water.
Fossil fuel plants use less than 1% of all of Colorado’s water. Yet in a state with virtually no raw water resources left to develop, even relatively small uses have gained attention. Colorado’s power future will have implications for its communities and their water, but how exactly that will look remains unknown.
Emissions Goals
The year 2019 was pivotal in Colorado’s energy transition. State lawmakers adopted legislation that specified a 50% economy-wide reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and 100% by 2050. A decade before, that bill would have been laughed out of the Colorado Capitol. Even in 2019, some thought it unrealistic. But proponents had the votes, and a governor who had run on a platform of renewable energy.
Something approaching consensus had been achieved regarding the risks posed by climate change. Costs of renewables had plummeted during the prior decade, 70% for wind and 89% for solar, according to the 2019 report by Lazard, a financial analyst. Utilities had learned how to integrate high levels of renewables into their power supplies without imperiling reliability. Lithium-ion batteries that can store up to four hours of energy were also dropping in price.
Colorado lawmakers have adopted dozens of laws since 2019 intended to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Tied at the legislative hip to the targets adopted in 2019 were mandates to Colorado’s two investor-owned electric utilities, Xcel Energy and Black Hills Energy. By 2030 they must reduce emissions by at least 80% compared to 2005 levels. Both aim to do even better.
Xcel, the largest electrical utility in Colorado, was already pivoting. In 2017, it received bids from wind and solar developers in response to an all-sources solicitation that caused jaws across the nation to drop. In December 2018 shortly after the election of Gov. Polis, Xcel officials gathered in Denver to boldly declare plans to reduce emissions by 80% by 2030. Platte River Power Authority, the provider for Fort Collins and three other cities in the northern Front Range, later that month adopted a highly conditioned 100% goal. In January 2020, Tri-State announced its plans to close coal plants and accelerate its shift to renewables — it plans to reduce emissions by 89% by 2030. In December 2021, Holy Cross Energy, the electrical cooperative serving the Vail and Aspen areas, adopted a 100% goal for 2030. It expects to get to 91% by 2025.
Colorado Springs Utilities burned the last coal at the Martin Drake power plant along Fountain Creek in August 2022. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Colorado’s emissions-reduction goals are economy wide, not just for power production. In practice, this means replacing technologies in transportation, buildings and other sectors that produce greenhouse gas emissions with low- or no-emissions energy sources. As coal plants have closed, transportation has become the highest-emitting sector. Colorado had 126,000 registered electric vehicles and hybrids as of June but hopes to have 940,000 registered by 2030. Buildings pose a greater challenge because most of us don’t replace houses the way we do cars or cell phones. Solutions vary, but many involve increased use of electricity instead of natural gas.
A final twist that has some bearing on water is Colorado’s goal of a “just transition.” House Bill 19-1314 declared that coal-sector workers and communities were not to be cast aside. Efforts would be made to keep them economically and culturally whole.
Possible Water Dividends
The Cherokee Generating Station north of downtown Denver is now a natural gas-fired power plant.
Where does this leave water? That’s unclear and, as the 2024 legislation regarding the Yampa Valley spelled out, it is likely to remain unclear for some time. The law prohibits the Division 6 water judge — for the Yampa, White and North Platte river basins — from considering the decrease in use or nonuse of a water right owned by an electric utility in the Yampa Valley.
In other words, they can sit on these water rights through 2050 while they try to figure what technologies will emerge as cost competitive. Xcel Energy and Tri-State will not lose their water rights simply because they’re not using them during this time as would, at least theoretically, be the case with other water users in Colorado.
Conversion of the Cherokee power plant north of downtown Denver from coal to natural gas provides one case study of how energy shifts can affect water resources. Xcel converted the plant to natural gas between 2010 and 2015. Its capacity is now 928 megawatts.
Richard Belt, a water resources consultant for Xcel, says that when Cherokee still burned coal, it used 7,000 to 8,000 acre-feet of water per year; since 2017, when natural gas replaced coal, it uses 3,000 to 3,500 acre-feet per year.
Does that saved water now flow downstream to farmers in northeastern Colorado?
“If the wind is really blowing, there could be some water heading downstream on certain days,” Belt answered. In other words, there’s so much renewable energy in the grid that production from the gas plant at times is not needed. A more concrete way to look at this conversion, Belt says, is to step back and look at Xcel’s water use more broadly across its system. It also has the Rocky Mountain Energy Center, a 685-megawatt combined-cycle natural gas plant along Interstate 76 near Keenesburg that it bought in 2009 and began operating in 2012. With the plant came a water contract from Aurora Water.
Xcel has been renegotiating that contract, which it projects will be effective in early 2025. The new contract will allow Xcel to take water saved at Cherokee and instead use it at the Rocky Mountain Energy Center. That will allow it to use 2,000 acre-feet less of the water it has been leasing from Aurora each year. Belt says it will save Xcel customers around $1 million a year in water costs.
“Another way to look at this dividend is that we’re going to hand [Aurora] two-thirds of this contract volume, around 2,000 acre-feet a year, and they can use that water within their system,” Belt explains.
Other coal-burning power plants have also closed in recent years, with water dividends of their own. One small coal plant in southwestern Colorado at Nucla, operated by Tri-State, was closed in 2019. In 2022, Xcel shut down one of its three coal units at the Comanche Generating Station in Pueblo.
Colorado Springs Utilities stopped burning coal at its Martin Drake coal-fired plant in 2021, which is located near the city’s center, and replaced it with natural gas. It used some 2,000 acre-feet of water per year in the early 2000s, and was down to only 14 acre-feet per year in 2023. Colorado Springs Utilities — a provider of both electricity and water — delivers 70,000 to 75,000 acre-feet of water annually to its customers. Whatever water savings were achieved in that transition will be folded into the broader operations. The city’s remaining coal plant, Ray Nixon, burns both coal and natural gas. The city delivers about 2,000 acre-feet per year to Nixon to augment groundwater use there.
The 280-megawatt Rawhide coal-fired power plant north of Fort Collins is to be shut down by 2030. Platte River Power Authority, which owns and operates the plant, had not yet chosen a replacement power source as of June 2024. Platte River delivers electricity to Estes Park, Fort Collins, Longmont and Loveland.
The Cherokee plant along the South Platte River north of downtown Denver uses significantly less water since tis conversion from coal to natural gas. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
That leaves just the 505-megawatt Pawnee among Colorado’s existing coal plants. The plant near Brush is to be retrofitted to burn natural gas by 2026. The water dividend? Xcel is trying to keep its options open.
The one commonality among all the possible power-generating technologies that Xcel may use to achieve its goal of emissions-free energy by 2050 is that, with the exception of some battery technologies, they all require water, says Belt. And that, he says, means it would be unwise to relinquish water without first making decisions about the future.
That’s why this year’s bill was needed. Colorado’s two biggest electrical providers, Xcel and Tri-State, both with coal plants retiring in the Yampa Valley, have questions unanswered.
The Future of Energy
Strontia Springs Dam and Reservoir, located on the South Platte River within Waterton Canyon. It is ranked #32 out of 45 hydroelectric power plants in Colorado in terms of total annual net electricity generation. Photo by Milehightraveler/iStock
What comes next? Obviously, lots more wind and solar. Lots. The graph of projected solar power in Colorado through this decade looks like the Great Plains rising up to Longs Peak. Construction of Xcel’s Colorado Power Pathway, a 450-mile transmission line looping around the Eastern Plains, will expedite renewables coming online. Tri-State is also constructing new transmission lines in eastern Colorado. The plains landscape, San Luis Valley, and other locations could look very different by the end of the decade.
Very little water is needed for renewables, at least once the towers and panels are put into place.
You may well point out that the sun goes down, and the wind doesn’t always blow. Storage is one holy grail in this energy transition. Lithium-ion batteries can store energy for four hours. That works very effectively until it doesn’t. Needed are new cost-effective technologies or far more application of known technologies.
One possible storage method, called iron-rust, will likely be tested at Pueblo in 2025 by a collaboration between Xcel and Form Energy, a company that proclaims it will transform the grid. It could provide 100 hours of storage. Tri-State’s electric resource plan identifies the same technology.
Granby Dam was retrofitted at a cost of $5.1 million to produce hydroelectricity effective May 2016. It produces enough electricity for about 570 homes. Photo/Northern Water
Other potential storage technologies involve water. Pumped-storage hydropower is an old and proven technology. It requires vertical differences in elevation, and Colorado has that. In practice, finding the right spots for the two reservoirs, higher and lower, is difficult.
Xcel Energy’s Cabin Creek project between Georgetown and Guanella Pass began electrical production in 1967. In this closed-loop system, water from the higher reservoir is released through a three-quarter-mile tunnel to the second reservoir 1,192 feet lower in elevation. This generates a maximum 324 megawatts to help meet peak demands or to provide power when it’s dark or the wind stops blowing. When electricity is more freely available, the water can be pumped back to the higher reservoir. Very little water is lost.
Near Leadville, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has a pumped-storage hydropower project at Twin Lakes, the Mt. Elbert Power Plant, with a more modest elevation difference. The plant can generate up to 200 megawatts of electricity.
Graphic credit: Joan Carstensen
A private developer with something similar in mind has reported reaching agreements with private landowners along the Yampa River between Hayden and Craig. With private landowners, the approval process would be far easier than if this were located on federal lands. Cost is estimated at $1.5 billion.
Belt points out that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has streamlined the permitting process for pumped-storage hydro but that technology remains expensive and projects will take probably 10 to 12 years to develop if everything goes well.
“During that 10 to 12 years, does something new come along? And if you’re committed to pumped storage, then you can’t pivot to this new thing without a financial impact,” he says, explaining a hesitancy around pumped storage.
Green hydrogen is another leading candidate in the Yampa Valley and elsewhere. It uses electrolysis to separate the hydrogen and oxygen in water. Renewable energy can be used to fuel the electrolysis. That’s why it is called green hydrogen as distinct from blue hydrogen, which uses natural gas as a catalyst. A news story in 2023 called it a “distant proposition.” Costs remain high but are falling. Tax incentives seek to spur that innovation.
Gov. Polis’ administration remains optimistic about hydrogen. It participated in a proposal for federal funding that would have created underground hydrogen storage near Brush. That proposal was rejected, but Will Toor, the chief executive of the Colorado Energy Office, has made it clear that green hydrogen and other emerging technologies remain on the table. Xcel says the same thing. “It’s not something we are going to give up on quite yet,” says Belt. The water savings from the conversion of coal to natural gas could possibly play into those plans.
Gov. Jared Polis stopped by the Good Vibes River Gear in Craig in March 2020 prior to attending a just transition workshop. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Polis is bullish on geothermal, both kinds. The easier geothermal uses the relatively constant 55 degree temperatures found 8 to 10 feet below ground to heat and cool buildings. The Colorado Capitol has geothermal heating, but the most famous example is Colorado Mesa University, where geothermal heats and cools about 80% of the campus. This technology may come on strong in Colorado, especially in new construction.
Can heat found at greater depths, say 10,000 feet or from particularly hot spots near the surface, be mined to produce electricity? California generates 10.1% from enhanced geothermal, Nevada 5.1%, and Utah 1.5%. Colorado generates zero. At a June conference, Polis said he thought geothermal could produce 4% to even 8% of the state’s electricity by 2040. Geothermal for electric production would require modest water resources.
Nuclear? Those plants, like coal, require water. Many smart people believe it may be the only way that civilization can reduce emissions as rapidly as climate scientists say is necessary to avoid catastrophic repercussions. Others see it as a way to accomplish just transition as coal plants retire.
Costs of traditional nuclear remain daunting. Critics point to projects in other states. In Georgia, for example, a pair of reactors called Vogtle have been completed but seven years late and at a cost of $35 billion, more than double the project’s initially estimated $14 billion price tag. The two reactors have a combined generating capacity of 2,430 megawatts.
New reactor designs may lower costs. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2023 certified design of a small-modular reactor by NuScale. It was heralded as a breakthrough, but NuScale cancelled a contract later that year for a plant in Idaho, citing escalating costs.
With a sodium fast reactor, integrated energy storage and flexible power production, the Natrium technology offers carbon-free energy at a competitive cost and is ready to integrate seamlessly into electric grids with high levels of renewables. Graphic credit: http://NatriumPower.com
Greater optimism has buoyed plans in Wyoming by the Bill Gates-backed TerraPower for a 345-megawatt nuclear plant near the site of a coal plant at Kemmerer. It has several innovations, including molten salt for energy storage and a design that allows more flexible generation, creating a better fit with renewables. Ground was broken in June for one building. An application for the design is pending with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Gates has invested $1 billion and expects to invest many billions more in what he estimates will be a $10 billion final cost. He also hopes to see about 100 similar plants and reduced costs. Other companies with still other designs and ideas say they can also reduce costs. All these lower-cost nuclear solutions exist in models, not on the ground. Uranium supply remains problematic, at least for now, but more difficult yet is the question of radioactive waste disposal.
Into The Future
The potential for nuclear is balled up in the issue of just transition. Legislators in 2019 said that coal communities would not be left on their own to figure out their futures. What this means in practice remains fuzzy.
Consider Pueblo. Xcel Energy on August 1 is scheduled to submit to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission what is being called the Pueblo Just Transition Electric Resource Plan. Through that plan, Xcel must determine to what extent it can, through new generating sources, leave Pueblo economically whole after it closes the coal plants. Existing jobs will be lost, although others in post-closure remediation of the site will be gained. What, then, constitutes a just transition for Pueblo?
What will Xcel propose in October for Pueblo as it makes plans for the retired of the last of the Comanche coal-burning units in 2030? Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
A task force assembled by Xcel Energy in January delivered its conclusions after nearly a year of study: “Of all of the technologies that we studied, only advanced nuclear generation will make Pueblo whole and also provide a path to prosperity,” concluded the task force. They advised that a natural gas plant with carbon capture would be a distinctly secondary choice.
What will happen with the water in Pueblo? Xcel Energy has a take-or-pay water contract with Pueblo Water for 12,783 acre-feet per year for the Comanche Generating Station. It must pay for the water even if it does not take it. Pueblo Water has a similar take-or-pay contract for 1,000 acre-feet annually for the 440-megawatt natural gas plant operated by Black Hills Energy near the Pueblo airport.
The draw of these water leases from the Arkansas River isn’t that notable, says Chris Woodka, president of the Pueblo Water board, even in what he describes as a “small year,” with low flows in the river. These water leases constitute some 5% or less of the river’s water, Woodka says. Xcel could tap that same lease for whatever it plans at Pueblo. And if it has no use? “We haven’t had many conversations around what we would do if that lease goes away, because it is so far out in the future.”
Xcel and Tri-State both own considerable water rights in the lower Arkansas Valley, near Las Animas and Lamar. Neither utility has shared plans for using the water, as the ideas of coal or nuclear power plants that initially inspired the water purchases never moved forward. Water in both cases has been leased since its acquisition to Arkansas Basin agricultural producers in order to maintain an ongoing beneficial use.
Yampa River. Photo credit: Yampa River Integrated Water Management Plan website
Why don’t Tri-State and Xcel lease their water in the Yampa River as they do in the Arkansas? Jackie Brown, the senior water and natural resources advisor for Tri-State, explains that there is no demand for additional agricultural water in the Yampa Basin. About 99% of all lands capable of supporting irrigated agriculture already get water. This is almost exclusively for animal forage. This is a valley of hay.
However, the Yampa River itself needs more water. The lower portion in recent years has routinely suffered from low flows during the rising heat of summer. Some summers, flows at Deerlodge, near the entrance to Dinosaur National Monument, have drooped to 20 cubic feet per second. Even in Steamboat, upstream from the power plants, fishing and other forms of recreation, such as tubing, have at times been restricted.
One question asked in drafting the legislation this year was whether to seek protection with a temporary instream flow right for some of the 45 cfs that Tri-State and Xcel together use at the plants at Craig and Hayden. The intent would have been to protect the delivery of some portion of that water to Dinosaur National Monument through 2050. That idea met resistance from stakeholders.
Instead, a do-nothing approach was adopted. Those framing the bill expect that most of the time, most of the water will flow downstream to Dinosaur anyway. In most years, no demands are placed on the river from November through the end of June. The challenge comes from July through October. The amount of water, used formerly by coal plants, that reaches Dinosaur will depend upon conditions at any particular time. Have the soils been drying out? Has the summer monsoon arrived?
The Yampa River at Deerlodge Park July 24, 2021 downstream from the confluence with the Little Snake River. There was a ditch running in Maybell above this location. Irrigated hay looked good. Dryland hay not so much.
“Even if you’re adding even half of that [45 cfs], it is a big deal,” says Brown. “If you can double the flow of a river when it’s in dire circumstances it’s a big deal.”
A study conducted by the Colorado River Water Conservation District several years ago examined how much water released from Elkhead Reservoir, located near Hayden, would reach Dinosaur. The result: 88% to 90% did.
Brown says river managers will be closely studying whether the extra water can assist with recovery of endangered fish species and other issues. “There’s a lot of learning to be done. My key takeaway is that that’s really going to contribute to the volume of knowledge that we have and the future management decisions that are made.”
A larger takeaway about this new law is that it gives Colorado’s two biggest electrical providers time. Xcel and Tri-State don’t know all the answers as we stretch to eradicate emissions from our energy by mid-century. Many balls are in the air, some interconnected, each representing a technology that may be useful or necessary to complement the enormous potential of wind and solar generation now being created. All of these new technologies will require water. Some water in the conversion from coal is being saved now, but it’s possible it will be needed in the future.
No wonder Xcel’s Belt says its “imprudent in a very water-constrained region to let go of a water asset that you may not get back, until you know how some of these balls are going to land.”
