It’s January 2027, and for the last few months, a super El Nino has already delivered torrential rains to the Pacific Coast of North America. California’s reservoirs have been releasing record quantities of water to preserve space for the next round of precipitation but their remaining capacity to absorb runoff is dangerously low. From the peaks […]
Whenever evaluating a new energy technology, caution is warranted. During what was arguably the first big cleantech boom around 2009, schemes were sold to angel investors thrilled to find a hot sector in the wake of the recent financial crash. Almost anything that sounded good got funded. Some of these schemes, such as a “clean” […]
There are at least three ways to evaluate the economic viability of energy projects. The easiest way is to just repeat whatever is in a press release. The other extreme, a mandatory exercise for anyone poised to actually invest and build a project, is to develop complex projections that take into account the benefits of […]
The reason to socialize a portion of the cost of major infrastructure is so the ratepayer doesn’t have to bear an unaffordable share of the construction financing payments. The broader benefit to society is to achieve greater affordability for what constitutes raw materials for prosperity; transportation, water, and energy. Whether or not they are ever […]
California’s oil industry has been active for well over a century, and Los Angeles was always at the heart of it. By 1894, about 80 wells were already producing oil in the city, setting off a boom that peaked in the 1970s at nearly 100 million barrels per year. Today oil production in Los Angeles County is barely […]
When choosing what policies and projects might best ensure abundant water for California’s ecosystems, farms, and cities, the role of the delta is central. Even if large scale desalination were to someday deliver over a million acre feet of water per year to California’s coastal cities, how we manage the delta affects many times that […]
A recent article in Grist characterized recent efforts by the Trump administration to preserve Scott Dam as a “culture war crusade.” That is accurate, so long as we recognize that efforts to demolish the dam – and diminish the value of the entire Potter Valley Project that the dam is a part of – are also the result of a culture […]
There is no realistic scenario imaginable that does not include Californians consuming at least another five billion barrels of oil before the state achieves its much touted official goal of a “clean energy future.” Here are the numbers: In 2025, Californians consumed 484 million barrels of crude oil. To understand why another five billion barrels is […]
The recently released “Water Renaissance” plan, a product of “conservation groups and tribes,” gets a very big idea right. There is no reason why California’s coastal megacities should have to import water. With that one visionary presumption, this report has made a major contribution. In fact, it doesn’t go far enough. With massive, targeted investments, […]
Whether it’s an energy project or a water project, it’s important to avoid conflating capacity with actual production, or yield. With energy projects, that difference is much more certain than with water projects. For example, in 2024, California’s lone remaining nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon, with an output capacity of 2.4 gigawatts, would have produced […]