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The U.S. – Israel Center (USIC) at UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management recently unveiled a new rain barrel program at three San Diego schools and Pacific Beach Middle is one of the schools participating in the international project.

Earlier this month, four rain barrels, which will collect the water from the school’s roof and save it, were installed at the middle school. Students will use the captured rain water to care for campus gardens, and students at the Farm Lab also will use it to flush toilets.

Spurning dams for research in water technology, President Obama laid out a striking contrast Tuesday to the strategies adopted by California lawmakers in both parties on how to remedy Western water shortages.

In a final budget plan that was dead even before its arrival on Capitol Hill, the administration’s vision of investing $269 million in research on water desalination, recycling and efficiency will find little traction in the Republican-controlled Congress. But it does lay out an alternative to the dams, water tunnels and other giant building projects that Gov. Jerry Brown, Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and Central Valley House Republicans have embraced to varying degrees.

It’s one of the lesser-known costs of California’s drought: the drying-up of the state’s normally abundant cheap hydroelectric power.

A hydro shortage has raised California’s electricity costs by a combined $2 billion the past four years, according to a report released Tuesday by the Pacific Institute, a water policy think tank based in Oakland. In addition, the institute said the drought has contributed to climate change: California’s fossil-fuel power plants have increased greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent to make up for the hydro shortage.

If there was one overriding theme to last year’s World Ag Expo it was water, with California farmers and ranchers clamoring to see the latest technology available to stretch the precious resource.

Soon after the gates opened Tuesday for this year’s show, a slight but noticeable change was apparent, as the booths selling irrigation equipment, filters, ground sensors and other irrigation-related products weren’t quite as busy as last year.