Reply #27: Hydro capacity in California is about 13,000 megawatts. [View All]

[hunter]

A large fraction of that water is already confined within various water projects, some of which are already operating as pumped hydro storage systems.

The state water project also uses huge amounts of electricity to pump water south. This system has been upgraded over the years to use more off-peak power rather than running continuously and further improvement projects are ongoing. This hydroelectric system alone could accommodate large scale solar and wind development without further need for natural gas plants. Unfortunately it's often easier to build more turnkey gas plants. Large hydro plants and plant modifications require very sophisticated engineering because each project is unique. For natural gas plants a developer acquires the site, wrangles out the approvals, and writes a check for an existing design.

The Salton Sea projects are speculative. I haven't looked at them recently. Try google. One of the great stumbling blocks is our relationship with Mexico. Forget McCain's accusation of California "stealing water" from Arizona. Beyond that the United States has never left much Colorado river water for our own indigenous people or for Mexico. And we've utterly destroyed the riparian environment of the lower Colorado River just as we destroyed the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. We'll never really know what those places were like before our industrial society erased them from the earth.

As an aside, I think it's disgusting how we hear so often about the extinction of Chinese river dolphins but hear so very little about the (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaquita) vaquita which were almost certainly devastated by Colorado River development. Those few vaquita remaining are now threatened by fishing.

Hydro projects have always been about money and development. It's probably not feasible to rip them all out (one can dream...) but they might be reworked to accommodate increasing supplies of renewable energy and the restoration of natural riparian environments.