Extreme heat could also mean energy and water shortages

Federal Reclamation Bureau officials reported this month As two large western reservoirs — Lake Mead in Nevada and Arizona and Powell Lakes in Utah and Colorado — are deteriorating into a “dead pool,” the stored water is so low that it cannot bury them by burying hydroelectric power generators. presetan. As a result, the agency has begun releasing water up the river from the Flaming Gorge Reservoir in Wyoming and from the reservoirs in New Mexico and Colorado. Lake Powell is expected to be low enough to threaten the ability to generate hydroelectric power at Glen Canyon Dam.

Earlier this summer, the agency is expected to announce federal water restrictions for Arizona, Nevada and California beginning in January 2022. Reporting to the Associated Press.

During the last major drought in California, between 2012 and 2015, the state used its electricity supply from the Pacific Northwest to make up for its shortages. But that could be tougher this year because the region is suffering from a dry season that has created out-of-control fires and damaged crops.

On July 18, the 98 percent soil moisture in Washington was “very short or short,” XXI. The driest recorded since the turn of the century, according to the latest drought control report. Washington led the country to be “very poor” in soil and pastures, spring wheat and barley, while “similar dry crops” were given in Montana, Arizona, Oregon, Utah, Nevada and Wyoming.

Because of Canada’s snowpack and surface water, the northwestern U.S. has water to meet its electricity and irrigation demands, but not too much, according to Douev Johnson Bonneville Power Administration spokesman. 31 a federal dam and a nuclear power plant. “It’s an average water year, so we want to make sure each one is based on their setup and doesn’t count on the surplus,” Johnson said. “It’s not something people can trust. There will be additional energy, but it depends on the day and the week. “

Last August, California suffered power outages After rising temperatures across the state, along with the demand for air conditioning. The crisis was blamed on poor state public service planning, as well as a worsening of the effects of climate change, experts say, has pushed up high temperatures and played a role in the drought. The perfect storm of low water supply, extreme heat and high power demand will distort the power grid in some places, even if it doesn’t break. Jordan Kern, an assistant professor of forest and environmental resources at North Carolina State University, who studies water, energy, and climate change. In the coming weeks, “if you get 115 or 120 degrees heat in western places,” Kern says, “especially in California, when everyone uses air conditioning, they’ll run out of electricity.”

In the past, they denounced utilities like PG&E management failures related to blackouts, for example, they did not tell customers that the demand reduction interruptions were immediate and relied on the power of closed power plants. This year, the same utility announced plans last week Bury 10,000 miles of power line to reduce the risk of igniting fires that ignite power lines.

Kern warns that climate change has led to higher temperatures and a worsening of the effects of the drought. “One way to find out if it’s a bad summer or something different in the climate is to look at what happened in the past,” Kern says. “If you could go back 50 years and see the summer temperatures and figure it out in a bell curve, and if it did this year, it would be off the charts this year.”