MURDER HORNETS AND SOLAR SHADE
My vaguely serious effort to do a bit of a local news detox over the holidays went pretty well, thanks to simply switching to regional news to feed my addiction. Here are a few tidbits.
Skiers and mountain lovers from the Bay Area, Sacramento and Reno have plenty of reasons to avoid Mammoth in favor of Lake Tahoe, and they just got another one.
Alterra Mountain Company’s massive redevelopment plan for Palisades Tahoe in Olympic Valley was approved by the Placer County Board of Supervisors on Nov. 20. The revamp is huge. It will consume about 85 acres at the base of the ski hill. The plan calls for 850 lodging units, 1,500 hotel rooms, 300,000-square feet of commercial space, 3,000 parking spaces (think about that groundbreaking idea while trudging through the sludge to the Village or to Mammoth Main Lodge), and employee housing for up to 300 worker bees (another whizbang idea). That investment makes Alterra’s proposed revamp of Mammoth Mountain’s Base look rather skimpy. Anyway, the buildout at Palisade swill take about 25 years. Or roughly twice as long as the 13-year planning and approval process took. And yes, not everyone in North Lake Tahoe was happy about the sprawling “upgrade,” but it was approved despite nine hours of public comment, mostly negative.
One big Western news story generating plenty of buzz was the recent announcement that the pitched battle to fight off the dreaded invasion by murder hornets has been won.
Murder hornets, of course, were phase two of the plague arriving five years ago, winging their way into our Covid-era consciousness as a stinging symbol of the coming apocalypse. The apocalypse will have to wait. After a five-year war on the pesky pest, the Washington State Department of Agriculture pest program recently declared victory and announced the murder hornet hordes have been “eradicated.”
Another happy story involves the Great Salt Lake. Alarm bells have been going off for years as the lake levels continued to drop. The shrinking lake prompted comparisons to our very own Owens “Dry” Lake, which dried up and turned into the biggest single source of PM10 dust in the country. But it seems “saving” Mono Lake would have been a better comparison. This December, the Great Salt Lake water watchers reported about 70,000-acre feet of water has been “donated” to the effort to keep the Great Salt Lake a lake, according to Fox 13 News, Salt Lake.
For comparison, 70,000-acre feet is about the yearly average amount of water sent down the LA Aqueduct to keep Los Angeles from drying up. The big donations to the Salt Lake came from the Utah’s big players, The Church of Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) and Rio Tinto Kennecott, (the copper mine and one of the largest open-pit mines in the world), along with some cities and irrigation districts.
In the “Money Talks, BS Walks” Water Department we have solid results so far in the effort to keep more water in Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir and another source of SoCal water. Instead of lecturing and pleading, the federal government and the Imperial Irrigation District offered cash to farmers not to farm. Guess what, it worked. Hay farmers got about $300 for every acre foot of water they didn’t use to grow hay in the desert (dumb idea to start with, but here we are). About 154,000 acres were left fallow. That kept about 700,000 acre feet of water in the reservoir, the LA Times reported.
Unfortunately, that news was swamped by the return of widespread dry and drought conditions in the Western US and California.
The dry start to the snow year is most likely why the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has decided its previous decision to take merely 4,500-acre feet of water from the Mono Basin can’t hold water anymore (see related story page 9). Instead, to the dismay of the Mono Lake Committee, LADWP calmly and without notice kept diverting water after hitting the 4,500-acre foot target. The committee had hailed and celebrated the decision to take less than the legally allowed 16,000-acre feet this year. That was called a significant decision reflecting the “a new collaborative approach to restoring Mono Lake,” as the committee webpage notes. Plus, it touted that none other than LA Mayor Karen Bass endorsed the original plan to take less water. But Mayor Bass and probably other Mono Lake fans might have forgotten about the routine bit of LADWP boilerplate attached to any and all projections, estimates and promises.
As of Jan. 1, the committee webpage reported LADWP had taken about 7,000-acre feet from the basin and the gates were still open and LADWP confirmed it would divert the legal limit of 16,000-acre feet of water by March 2025.
Finally, a bit of a head scratcher. Several news outlets reported that California is currently generating so much solar power during the day that the juice overwhelms the grid and exceeds demand fairly regularly. So the grid operators tell large commercial solar operators to curtail or shut down operations (some are able to “wheel” the power and sell it to other states). The best estimate in the LA Times was last year the state shut down enough solar energy to power about half a million homes for a year.
On the heels of that news the Bureau of Land Management has issued permits for nearly 29 gigawatts of clean energy (mainly solar and wind) in the Western US and about 66 more utility-scale renewable projects are in the permitting pipeline.
Closer to home, the BLM has designated about 12 million acres of federal land in Nevada for possible utility-scale solar projects. That includes land bordering Death Valley National Park and the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge.
Right down US 395 near Mojave, LADWP completed its latest solar project, the Eland Solar-plus-Storage Center, sitting on about 4,600 acres. The project will power about 266,000 households in LA, and adds to the department’s current output of 1,100 megawatts of solar power. The Eland project is the first for LADWP to combine solar generation and battery storage, which allows the electricity to be released at night and in the evening when the solar panels literally go dark. Battery storage is noted as one way to take full advantage of solar power by evening out energy flows throughout the day.
Jon Klusmire of Bishop is trying to even out his energy surges so he can get off the couch quicker.
