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There are seven months to go before the November elections, and Californian’s will be asked whether or not to we want to borrow $11 billion for a variety of state-financed water projects. In total, we’ll be paying back $800 million per year for the next 30 years. Here is a breakdown of what it will pay for, courtesy of the state’s Department of Water Resources (redrawn because, well, pie charts suck).

Environmental organizations so far are divided on the issue. Here is a list of environmental organizations with stated positions on the 2010 California water bond:

I’ll try to keep this post updated as organizations either endorse or condemn the ballot measure. If you have information to add, leave a comment or email me at mheberger@yahoo.com.

Notably, I have not read anything yet from Environmental Defense or the Natural Resources Defense Council. I specifically mention these two organizations because they endorsed last fall’s package of water bills, which included legislation enabling the water bond. I wonder if they later regretted it; by all accounts the bills got watered down and filled with pork in last-minute wrangling. (The bond was authorized by the state legislature last fall as part of a package of bills SBX 7-1, 7-2, 7-6, 7-7, and 7-8 (links point to the text of the bill and analyses at leginfo.ca.gov) The acronym stands for Senate Bill, Extraordinary Session. How come when I work overtime, nobody calls it extraordinary?)

The Pacific Institute is currently researching and writing a detailed analysis of the water bond with generous funding from the Sausalito-based Panta Rhea foundation. In any public expenditure, the benefits are of course, not shared equally by all, so we will be looking in detail at who is likely to benefit from the bond. This will be enough for many voters to decide to reject the bond. In the words of Wes Strickland, a water lawyer and thoughtful blogger, “I would agree that requiring the beneficiaries of water projects to pay makes economic, as well as environmental and political sense. That is the concept of “full-cost pricing” of water and wastewater services, which was previously incorporated into the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Four Pillars of Sustainable Infrastructure.” He gives more thoughts on the issue of “redistribution” in a previous post:

An incisive criticism of the water bond would focus on whether public benefit is achieved by collecting taxes from all Californians and then distributing the proceeds to specific projects around the state. While the $11.14 billion fund includes earmarks for many specific areas (sometimes called “pork”), it is clear that not all citizens will receive benefits from the bond proceeds. In addition, an intelligent argument could be made that the water bond will distort economic incentives to use water wisely, since the true cost of water will not be captured in utility rates, but will be hidden in unrelated taxes for many years to come. Those are significant policy questions that voters should consider when heading to the polls in November.

Related to this argument, Bay-Area voters may be uneasy about financing projects around the state, as they’ve already been asked to contribute to finance their own water infrastructure. In the last several years, water customers served by either the SFPUC or EBMUD have paid billions to upgrade and improve their water supply systems. We are paying for these improvements in the form of higher rates, now and in the future. In other words, these projects have local benefits, and were paid for locally. Why then, should we be asked to pay again for water projects that benefit other communities? Should they not raise their own funds, as we have?

For an easily-digestible official view of the water reform legislation, including the bond, take a look at this presentation given by Rick Soehren, Assistant Deputy Director of the Department of Water Resources in March at the Water Conservation Showcase organized by the US Green Building Council Northern California Chapter. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of information there about the SBX 7-2, the bill authorizing the bond, other than a pie chart from

According to the Mercury News of San Jose, “the proposition “was written largely by lobbyist Joe Caves.” He is characterized as “a key player behind previous water bonds” and someone who is “a master broker who brings together environmentalists, business groups and various parts of the state that often have very different interests.” (via ballotopedia). Interesting. I immediately assumed the worst about him, but according to his website, he represents a lot of environmental organizations that I respect (but don’t always agree with when it comes to water policy).

Sources:

Chisholm, Graham and Mike Sweeney, “Water bond needed to save delta”, Guest editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle. April 16, 2010. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/16/ED9C1CVBH8.DTL

“Open Letter to the Delegates of the California Democratic Party Convention,” April 16, 2010. http://www.pcl.org/files/NoWaterBond_DelegatesLetter.pdf

This is why I love my alma mater. From Cornell’s PR wing:

The size of food portions and plates in more than four dozen depictions of the Last Supper — painted over the past 1,000 years — have gradually gotten bigger and bigger, according to a Cornell study published in The International Journal of Obesity (April, online March 23), a peer-reviewed publication.

The study found that the size of the entrées in paintings of the Last Supper, which according to the New Testament occurred during a Passover evening, has progressively grown 69 percent; plate size has increased 66 percent and bread size by about 23 percent, over the past millennium.

Figure 1 The relative size of the main dish in depictions of the Last Supper has increased over the millennium.

The author, Brian Wansink, is the author of the recent book Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think, which gets very high marks by reviewers at Amazon. Not to be confused with David Kessler’s The End of Overeating, which is the one with the yummy-looking carrot cake on the cover.

I have a fairly simple user-defined function for Excel that I use to create random passwords. (I got kind of freaked out last year after someone hacked into my Facebook account. Trouble was, I used the same password for lots of sites. If this petty crook had been a little more savvy, he could have done a lot more damage. At first, I immediately replaced a bunch of my passwords with strings like this: p9q4MF3nnX4B. The only problem now is that I can’t remember any of my passwords, and have to keep them in a file, which creates security concerns of its own…)

I noticed that my little password routine would repeatedly create the same password each time I used it anew, after re-starting the computer and re-launching Excel. It turns out that VBA’s RAND function is not as random as you’d think it might be. The way around this is

I saw this code that I found on the techguy forum:

  seed = TimeValue("00:" & Format(Second(Time), "00") & ":" & Format(Minute(Time), "00"))
  Randomize (seed)

But according to the RND entry at the support site, you can just call Randomize on its own:

Before calling Rnd, use the Randomize statement without an argument to initialize the random-number generator with a seed based on the system timer.

I had never used Randomize before, and never knew that I needed to. In Python, a more sophisticated programming language, seeding is taken care of for you: “current system time is also used to initialize the generator when the module is first imported.”

Lots more information at the Wikipedia article on Pseudo-Random Number Generators. From here I learned, “A PRNG can be started from an arbitrary starting state using a seed state. It will always produce the same sequence thereafter when initialized with that state.”

The Natural Resources Defense Council released a report in March called Fever Pitch that seems to indicate that we might find ourselves vulnerable to Dengue Fever, a disease transmitted by mosquitoes that was heretofore only known in the tropics.

As temperatures rise, the potential for transmission of this dangerous disease may increase in vulnerable parts of the United States as warmer temperatures and changing rainfall conditions expand both the area suitable for the mosquito vectors and the length of the transmission season. An estimated 173.5 million Americans live in counties with one or both of the mosquito species that can transmit dengue fever.

Dengue Fever causes severe headache, muscle and joint pains, fever, and a rash, but is not usually fatal for healthy adults. The report notes that “currently, dengue fever and its complications cause an estimated 50 to 100 million infections, a half-million hospitalizations, and 22,000 deaths annually in more than 100 countries, including parts of South America, Central America, the Caribbean, India, Southeast Asia, and Africa.”

The report is largely conjecture; most of the cases reported in the US are from travelers who have recently returned from a trip to the tropics, but global warming is making the US more fertile territory for spread of the disease: “specific types of mosquitoes that can transmit dengue fever have become established in a swath of at least 28 states and the District of Columbia, and across the south and mid-Atlantic regions, creating a recipe for local transmission of the disease in the United States.”

Yet another reason to be worried about climate change. Why not listen to a few tracks from the fantastic band Dengue Fever to get your mind off things?

Just added to the African Music Calendar: Direct from Botswana! The Maru-a-Pula Marimba Ensemble will perform at La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley at 8pm on April 30. More information at La Peña’s website.

The ensemble is a group of students from one of Botswana’s premiere secondary schools. From the press release on the school’s website:

The award-winning Maru-a-Pula marimba band will come from Botswana to the Pacific Northwest in April 2010 to raise funds for  orphan scholarships. We need your support to make this tour a success.

The ten-piece marimba band will perform a celebration of music and cultural exchange, raising awareness of a continent’s struggles while looking to a future of hope and prosperity.

Botswana has one of the highest AIDS rates in the world and currently has more than 30,000 AIDS orphans. The school now funds 30 full orphan scholarships and hopes to raise the money to fund 60 full scholarships by 2010.

There is something about marimba music that is just so uplifting and infectious. Check out this video of them practicing:

I haven’t seen much media coverage accompanying the release of California’s 2009 Water Plan Update, probably because this document was released with little fanfare, perhaps because it was a year late. California’s Department of Water Resources (DWR), which was created in the 1950s to plan and build the State Water Project, is required by the legislature to publish a “water plan” every 5 years. DWR released the first part of the 2009 Water Plan Update the released on March 31, 2010, and they say the rest will be published sometime this month.

Putting together such a large document, which is meant to include input from the public and other concerns, is no small task, especially when staff are required to take days off without pay to help alleviate the budget crisis. But perhaps it’s well worth waiting for? According to the state, “it is a blueprint for sustainability and forges a new direction for water management in California.”

The document appears to be less than half complete. Of the planned 5 volumes, only the first 2 are complete. Time to get reading and see what made it in here. This figure on page 4-21 shows how much water we’re using where:

Here are the locations of the 19 power plants in the state that are using once-through cooling. (See previous post for more information.) This information is from Table 1 on page 3 of the Proposed Water Quality Control Policy on the Use of Coastal and Estuarine Waters for Power Plant Cooling Substitute Environmental Document, which you can view or download here.

View California Power Plants Using Once-Through Cooling in a larger map

I’ve also made a KML file you can view in Google Earth: ca_otc.kml (6 K).

According to statistics published by the US Geological Survey, the majority of water use in the US is for cooling at power plants:

Thermoelectric-power generation water withdrawals were an estimated 201 billion gallons per day in 2005, about 3 percent more than in 2000. In 2005, thermoelectric freshwater withdrawals accounted for 41 percent of all freshwater withdrawals. Nearly all of the water withdrawn for thermoelectric power was surface water used for once-through cooling at power plants. Twenty-nine percent of thermoelectric-power withdrawals were saline water from oceans and brackish coastal water bodies.

Most of the water use is what hydrologists call a “non-consumptive use,” because the water is withdrawn from lakes, rivers, or the ocean, used in a closed loop in power plants for cooling, and returned to its source, usually a few degrees warmer. In other words, all of it is returned to the source, and none of it is consumed. According to an article in the San Luis Obispo Tribune:

Environmentalists say the practice destroys too much sea life, but utility advocates argue the impact is minimal.

Screens prevent larger animals from entering the plants, but fish can die while trapped against these barriers. Anything smaller than the openings in the screens, including millions of tiny fish larvae, can enter the power plants and also die.

Federal rules ban new operations from drawing in seawater for such cooling systems.

On March 24, California’s State Water Resources Control Board proposed a policy that would force the 19 power plants that use once-through cooling to reduce their use of ocean water by 93%. Together, the state’s plants draw 15 billion gallons per day, a staggeringly large amount. According to an article in the San Diego Union Tribune, one of the affected power plants will switch to air-cooling, and another plant will simply close (as scheduled? Or is this decision accelerating its obsolescence?).

A little conjecture here: if plants were to switch to evaporative cooling, their use of water in absolute terms will decrease significantly, but their consumptive use will increase. Existing systems use huge quantities of water, but it is contained in a closed loop, so all of it is returned to the environment. Evaporators would use smaller absolute quantities of water, but a portion of that water evaporates and is lost. In addition, these systems usually use freshwater rather than salty ocean water.

The water board has prepared a “Substitute Environmental Document“, which apparently can take the place of a full Environmental Impact Review in some circumstances. In Section 4.1.1, beginning on page 96, the authors describe the possible alternatives for cooling the power plants. They believe that most plants will switch to “closed cycle wet cooling” which uses evaporation to cool water. Its advantage is that it uses much smaller quantities of water. However, unlike once-through cooling, it is a consumptive process. The authors state that the plants “would likely continue to use the same source water,” but also recommend the use of recycled water, or wastewater that has been treated to a very high level of purity.

In theory, saltwater can be used for evaporative cooling, but in practice, it has been plagued by problems. Salt in the water causes metal pipes and pumps to corrode, and minerals in the water cause scale buildup that restricts flow. The California Energy Commission completed a study in 2007 that found that saltwater cooling towers are feasible with the right design and technology. The study cites as proof 25 plants around the world where saltwater, or more commonly, brackish water is used in cooling towers.

Here are a few causes for concern:

 

1) Plants may decide that it is more feasible or economical to use freshwater in their cooling towers, which is in much more widespread use and has a much better track record. Water supplies in most coastal regions are already stretched to the breaking point, and this would place further stress on water supplies. If plants were to extract groundwater, it would cause further harm by drawing down coastal aquifers. This is more likely than it may sound, because groundwater in California is essentially a free-for-all; anyone who owns property and has the means to drill a well, is allowed by law to extract as much water as they like, regardless of the impact that it has on their neighbors or on nature.

 

2) Plants would discharge water that is extra salty, perhaps 150% or 200% of the concentration of seawater. That’s because some of the water has evaporated, leaving the salts behind. Managing this stream of hypersaline water posese some challenges, similar to those that arise in the siting and design of desalination plants, which have been opposed by many in California. I tend to think that these impacts are not the most important ones to worry about, and can be mitigated by designing an appropriate outfall or diffuser. However, there is no discussion of this in the water board’s environmental document

 

3) The Water Board expresses the hope that power plants will use recycled water for cooling. In water stressed coastal areas, recycled water may be better used for irrigation, or to recharge groundwater. This is especially important in coastal areas, where overdrafts have caused saltwater intrusion.

 

4) Plants may use chemicals to control scaling or corrosion, which will be discharged to the environment. The Water Board does not discuss the potential impacts of these chemicals, or how these impacts can be mitigated.

 

In summary, I applaud the Water Board for drafting policies that will protect the coastal environment. However, switching to other cooling technologies might lead to other water or environmental impacts, and a more thorough analysis of these is needed.

 

 

The San Francisco public radio station KALW now posts audio of recent shows online, including one of my favorites Africa Mix. Just go to http://www.kalw.org/music.html and click the name of the show. There are also some great blues, bluegrass, and folks shows. Not clear to me what Tangents or Music from Other Minds are all about…

Africa Mix also has a blog where they post upcoming concerts (I maintain an African Music calendar, and we link to one another), and view playlists:

http://kalwafricamix.blogspot.com/

So that I can find this again. A KML file that lets you view many old USGS and US Army maps in Google Earth:

US Army and USGS Topographic Maps v 16, 9 Dec ‘08 at the Google Earth Forum.

I’ve found the African maps and the historic topos to be especially interesting.