On the edge of the Mojave Desert, beneath 1,800 acres of scrubland and tumbleweeds, California’s giant public pension fund is trying to make a killing in the water business. CalPERS is the primary owner of the Willow Springs Water Bank, an underground reservoir that could hold as much water as Folsom Lake when fully developed. Its customers, mainly a collection of Los Angeles-area water agencies, pay fees to store water beneath the Kern County soil to bolster their supplies during dry periods.

In 2016, annual precipitation was average for the Central Valley and above average for northern California. But the allocation of Central Valley Project water to public water agencies that serve farmers south of the Delta was only 5%. The federal government blamed the low allocation of water on hydrological conditions, rather than environmental regulations that limited pumping of water and prevented water from being moved through the system to communities south of the Delta.

State officials said Wednesday that Californians reliant on water pumped out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta won’t face supply shortages, even as crews shut down a massive pumping station that serves much of Southern California for at least a month to make repairs to its intake reservoir. The repair effort involves Clifton Court Forebay, a shallow reservoir that serves as an entryway for a Delta pumping station critical to the State Water Project, the state-run water delivery network that moves water north to south through California.