High-capacity batteries aren’t just making electric vehicles viable. They’re also beginning to transform water utilities. In Southern California, a number of water utilities have begun to install large batteries alongside their pumping plants and water treatment facilities. The idea is to store energy in the batteries overnight, when energy is cheaper. Then during the daytime, when power is more expensive, a water agency can tap that battery power for its routine operations.

The California Department of Water Resources is facing a new and potentially very costly lawsuit over the failure of the spillways at Oroville Dam a year ago. A complaint filed in Butte County Superior Court Wednesday outlines approximately $120 million in losses claimed by more than 40 farms, businesses and other property owners along the Feather River downstream from the nation’s tallest dam.

In the midst of California’s severe drought back in 2014, more than 67-percent of California voters helped to pass Proposition 1, the $7.5 billion water bond to fund water quality, supply, treatment and storage projects. In the nearly four years since the bond’s passage we have seen the last historic drought come to an end, but the reprieve may be short-lived. And one fact remains unchanged: California still desperately needs to develop additional storage to capture runoff in above-average water years.

For California Governor Jerry Brown and his administration, 2017 was a water year to remember, and one that would figure into the drafting of the state’s 2018–19 budget, which was released early this month. The $190 billion proposed spending plan names California’s drought and the “extreme natural events of 2017” as determining factors in how the cash was divvied up.