California’s prolonged drought has visible consequences such as depleted reservoirs and mandatory water conservation rules. But one of the more expensive effects could be buried deep in your electric bill.
The Institute’s Peter Gleick says the reason is that power companies had to switch from cheap and clean hydroelectric power to more expensive natural gas.
“In a normal, wet hydrologic year we get rain it runs off into our reservoirs and our rivers and we generate electricity with that water. When we have a drought and we don’t have the water available, the amount of hydropower we get drops. What we did in this study is looked at the average amount of hydropower we normally get and what we have gotten in the last four years of the drought. And that shortfall in hydroelectricity, we have to make up somehow. In California, we make that up by burning natural gas. Natural gas is more expensive. It costs more to rate payers. And it produces more pollution than generating hydropower. And that’s what this assessment looked at. And the economic cost to rate payers have been about $2-billion dollars in the last four years. And about a ten percent increase in the pollution that we would have otherwise have gotten from our energy system,”
Gleick says the state has few options when it comes to adjusting for a shortfall in Hydropower because wind, solar, and nuclear energy are fairly static. Meaning natural gas is basically the only option.
“Natural gas is what we call the marginal energy source. When we don’t have hydro, we burn natural gas. When we don’t have wind, we burn natural gas. In part because natural gas is more flexible than those other sources. We take all the wind, solar, and nuclear and hydro power we can get and the rest we burn fossil fuels,”
In addition to an increase in carbon pollution, Gleick says one big concern is that enough climate change that has already occurred to make this pattern the new normal for California.
“We know that the climate is changing. We know that it is changing because of human emissions of greenhouse gases. We know that some of the worst impacts will be one water resources. And one of the fears is that California will see more of these extreme events. More dry periods in particular. And if we get more dry periods, we get less water. We are going to get less hydropower out of the water that we do get and we will have to make it up with something. And maybe we can build a lot more wind and solar. We are ramping those up quickly. But to the extent that we have to make it up with natural gas, it’s going to be a more polluting source of energy for us,”
