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The California think-tank Pacific Institute released a report—Impacts of California’s Drought: Hydroelectric Generation 2015 Update—earlier this month that contains significant false and misleading information that could negatively impact California rivers and delay the transition away from dirty energy.

First, the report and the news stories surrounding it repeatedly say that hydroelectric power is “less expensive” in California than competing sources. This statement gives credence to the anti-environmental mindset of discounting the negative impacts that dams and reservoirs have on free-flowing rivers, and disregards the externalized costs to the environment. In fact, the report omits the devastating impacts hydropower has on fish, wildlife, wetlands and countless other species that depend on healthy flowing rivers for survival. If the report would have included an “environmental full-cost accounting,” the cost of hydropower for California consumers would have been shown to be huge.

Last Sunday, I had a column that asked what I thought was a simple question: How much more development can our water supplies sustain?
I figured planners must be looking at this issue considering the drought and new groundwater legislation that requires a holistic attitude toward our basin as opposed to the “I got my straw, go get your own” way we’ve always done things.
Nope.

Even with about 58,000 new homes either in some phase of construction or approved to be built in and around Bakersfield, no one is looking at how all that new demand will affect our aquifer.

Fed by gushing runoff, some area reservoirs are filling fast: Lake Spaulding, which provides much of the water for the Auburn area is at 173 percent of normal, and Folsom Lake is at 118 percent.

Given rising levels, water leaders in Placer County rescinded an emergency drought status on Thursday. The Placer County Water Agency (PCWA) lifted the status when emergency conditions ended.

Warning that a drought-driven surge in well drilling is causing the earth to sag and imperiling long-term water supplies, a California senator wants to place more stringent limits on new wells.
In an effort sure to inflame ever-sensitive disputes over water rights, Senate Bill 1317, by Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, would have people hoping to sink new wells in strained basins obtain conditional use permits and furnish proof that a new well would not have “undesirable impacts” like causing the earth to sink or dropping water levels too low. It would halt new wells in critically overdrafted basins, of which there are currently 21 across the state.