Tag: Hoover Dam

Drought Impacts Both The Food and Energy Supply

– August 17, 2022

Low water levels in the Western states are causing a problematic crop yield. But they also impact our energy supply and push the power grid to the brink.

When temperatures rise and water levels drop, the energy sector gets squeezed hard. The consequences of water shortages are playing out now in swaths of the American West, where an expansive, decades-long drought is forcing drastic cuts in hydroelectric power generation. At the same time, exceptional heat has pushed energy demand to record highs.

According to a report by Vox, the flow of water is critical to the flow of electrons and heat. About 40 percent of water withdrawals — water taken out of groundwater or surface sources — in the United States go toward energy production. The large majority of that share is used to cool power plants. In turn, it requires energy to extract, purify, transport, and deliver water.

The United Nations Environment Programme warned this month that if drought conditions persist, the two largest hydroelectric reservoirs in the US — Lake Mead and Lake Powell —could eventually reach “dead pool status,” where water levels fall too low to flow downstream. Lake Mead fuels the Hoover Dam, which has a power capacity topping 2,000 megawatts while Lake Powell drives generators that peak at 1,300 megawatts at the Glen Canyon Dam.

This is all going to compound into a major problem that we are all going to be facing in the coming months, as the cold weather approaches.

“Water supplies for agriculture, fisheries, ecosystems, industry, cities, and energy are no longer stable given anthropogenic climate change,” Camille Calimlim Touton, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, told Congress in June.

Almost all crops are under a threat of a horrifically low yield. A lack of water and extreme heat is making farming incredibly difficult, if not impossible.

https://www.shtfplan.com

Meteorologists Warn ‘Megadrought’ in US Southwest is Worst in 1,200 Years

Sputnik – May 12, 2022

A new study has found that the 22-year-long water shortage plaguing the American Southwest and western Mexico is the region’s worst in more than a millennium – a phenomenon dubbed a “megadrought.”

The study, published in Nature Climate Change, found that soil moisture deprivation has exceeded that of a megadrought in the 16th century that was previously the region’s worst known drought.

It’s so bad that University of California Los Angeles geographer Park Williams, the study’s lead author, has warned it would take a prolonged shift in weather patterns to remedy things.

The researchers looked at tree rings to compare the present drought’s intensity with those of years past, since trees generally produce wider rings in wet years and narrower rings in drier years. They found that since 2000, the average soil moisture deficit was twice that of any drought of the past century, with nothing comparable being found until 1,200 years back.

The region has always been quite dry, of course, with four large deserts dominating the terrain and the rest being fairly arid. Indigenous civilization was well-adapted to the precarious conditions, but modern cities have been built without respect to climate – and may soon suffer the consequences.

Reservoirs created by hydroelectric dams, like the famous Hoover Dam outside Las Vegas, Nevada, that holds back Lake Mead, are reaching historic lows. The lake provides the City That Never Sleeps with its freshwater, but has suffered steady water loss since 1983, which has accelerated in recent years, requiring modifications to Hoover Dam’s turbines to allow it to continue producing electricity despite the low water level.

https://sputniknews.com