I am Cary Curtis, Chair of the Club's Environment and Natural Resource Forum and Heather Cooley, a senior research associated with the Pacific institutes of water and sustainability program which spans the entire month of August. We have 23 events -- November 13th so we have just just passed half the way. Tomorrow we have two events at noon in this room, there is a panel discussion entitled keeping Katrina out of California featuring a number of experts on water control you know, flood control and so forth from both the perspective of ecology and water supply and public policy that should be that should be good and and then tomorrow evening out in Lafayette at the Bentley School we have a similar or a related program called Is that the Delta Doomed. The sustainability of the Sacramento San Joaquin delta and the Peripheral Canal featuring speakers form various points of view. All of the events in the series can be found in the Common Wealth Magazine which is available out front or online at commonwealthclub.org where you make a register for any of these programs or any Common Wealth Club program. You may also register by calling the club's 24 Hour reservation line, the number is in the magazine. This series of events has been organized by the club's member led forums under the leadership of the Karl Fleming who couldn't be here today. Each of the club's forums has organized at least one event in the series. We are fortunate to receive generous grants from the David and Lucile Packard foundation and the Richard and Rhoda Goldman foundation and these guest have enabled us to reduce the price for these events including today. We are particularly pleased to be associated in this whole series with the Pacific institute of Oakland which is observing its 20th anniversary this year. Peter Glick and Ian Hart have been extremely helpful in organizing both the overall series frame work as well as several of the events like this one for example. The Pacific Institute publishes an influential series on various aspects of the fresh water outlook. Some of these publications are available out front. I would like to mention one special publication in particular and that is this book which was written by the key knot -- one of our key knot speakers on second of August, Gilbert Garside and that we have copies out front there is for sale their autograph by Mr. Garside, who by the way was the supervising district attorney of Los Angeles County in the OJ Simpson trial so, they has no bearing on this at all I just cant find it constantly fascinating that so this book is $150 but 100 percent of the purchases goes to water projects in West Africa. So your your purchase of the book is actually a charitable contribution. I am going to treat 100 percent of the of my purchase as a charitable contribution but you should consult your own tax advisor if you do that and we have various other books available this one and that which I think is free and and other materials that are here about water all of the events in the series are available in the update magazine now which now covers through the end of September so, this this event is going to be broadcasted on KQED Radio on September 13th, Thursday at 8 pm therefore we are going to take questions from the audience on written cards today and as usual I am going to ask you to turn off the ringers on your cell phone or set them to stun or something and camera in the back of the room is from Fora dot TV which is something like the C-span of the internet so this event will be on the internet if you want to watch it a second time Fora dot TV. All right so I am going to open the program officially for the radio Hello and welcome to today's meeting of the Common Wealth Club of California, I am Cary Curtis, Chair of the Club's Environment and Natural Resources forum and your chair for this evening's program we also welcome our listeners on the radio and we invite our audience to visit us on the internet at commonwealthclub.org and now it is my pleasure to introduce our speaker for the day Heather Cooley is the senior research associate with the Pacific Institute's Water and Sustainability Program. Miss Cooley's research interest include water privatization, California water issues, environmental justice and climate change Miss Cooley holds a BS in molecular environmental biology with an emphasis in ecology from UC Berkeley and an MS in energy and resources from UC Berkeley. Prior to coming to the pacific institute, Miss. Cooley worked at Lawrence Berkley labs studying climate and land use change and carbon cycling. Now, Heather Cooley. Thank you Kerry and I would like to thank the commonwealth club for inviting me here today. It's a pleasure to be here. Upon hearing the terms water and energy, most people immediately think of hydropower. And well, hydro electric generation certainly uses water the connections between water and energy are much more complex than most people realize. Water and energy are linked in very important ways. We use water to produce all forms of energy. We use water to mine uranium and coal. We also use a tremendous amount of water to absorb the heat that is produced as the byproduct of hydroelectric generation and in 2000, nearly 40 percent of all fresh water withdrawals in the United States were for cooling thermal electric plants. We also use water to produce solar panels and to clean wind turbines. Energy production also pollutes water, discharging cooling water increases the temperature of the receiving water and composes stresses for the aquatic organisms. In addition mine tailings often are high in heavy metals and are often highly acidic. Inadequate disposal continues to pollute streams through out the west. But in addition, most energy production contributes the climate change. And this will have a tremendous impact on both water availability and management. As temperatures warm in California we will see our snow pack decrease. More precipitation, more fall as rainfall and much more snow pack will melt earlier and so we will likely see large and broad scale changes and how we need to manage water. But unless recognized connection the one that I really want to focus on today, is that water management uses a substantial amount of energy particularly in California. So despite these many connections, water and energy issues are rarely considered together. Both have both personal and the policy level. However concerns about water scarcity, population growth and climate change, are really forcing us to rethink how we manage water and the relationship between these very important resources. California has developed an extensive infrastructure network, to transport water, where and when it is needed - to where and when it's available excuse me to where and when it's needed. Annual precipitation in California ranges from two to 160 inches per year. And much of that precipitation is focused is centered around the north and sharing about the mountains, however our population is really based in southern California and along the coast. In addition, the vast majority of the precipitation falls during the winter or it's demand is generally higher during the fall in the summer. And to make things even more interesting, California climate is subjected to periodic droughts or extended droughts punctuated by occasion of the periodic floods. So in response the federal, state and local governments have invested a substantial amount of money to move water around California. We have a number of federal projects, one being the Central Valley Project. The Central Valley Project was built beginning in about 1937 and consists of 20 dams and reservoirs located through out the state consists of numerous power plants and 500 miles of major canals. This system transports water from the Trinity, the Sacramento, the American, the Stanislaus, the San Joaquin rivers and transports to that to farms and communities in the central valley and urban areas around the San Francisco bay. California is also homed to a large state projects. The State Water Project transports an estimated four million acre-feet per year. The water is taken out of the delta at Tracy, is transported some of that water is delivered to communities in the San Francisco bay. Much of it though continue salt through the central valley, another branch goes off delivering some water to the central coast, but the vast majority of it is lifted nearly 2000 feet up and over the Tehachapi mountains at the southern part of the San Joaquin basin. This is the single largest lift of in the world. This water then cascades down the Tehachapi, some of that energy is recovered and then the water is then delivered to communities through out the Loss Angeles area. The state water project is the largest consumer of electricity in the state accounting for two to three percent of all electricity consume in California. And in total the state water project consumes five billion kilowatt hours of electricity per year which is equivalent to about a quarter of New Mexico's total electricity use in 2004, this is an extremely energy consuming project. We have also constructed water system funded with local money, including the HHE reservoir here, I am supplying water to San Francisco and the communities throughout the bay. This system takes water from the Ptolemy River, transports it across the central valley we have also built Mokelumne aqueduct providing water for the east bay east bay area, the Los-Angeles aqueduct which diverts water from the Owens river and the Mono basin moves water down through to Los Angeles. So in total, we have built a very vast network to move water and well some of these systems like the central valley project or HHE actually produced rely and gravity and actually produced some energy the majority including the state water project in the Colorado River are net energy consumers. So this movement of water, this vast movement of water has created tremendous differences in the energy intensity of various water supply sources. So communities rely on both imported water, ground water and small amounts of recycled water and desalination. But the energy intensity of these water supply sources varies tremendously, so in Santiago for example the state water projects uses about 10,000 kilo watt hours per million gallons. The Colorado River aqueduct is a a little bit better but both are - use substantial amounts of energy. In comparison with local ground water, the energy intensity of that is about 17,00 kilo watt hours per million gallons of water and recycled water is even less than that. But capturing and conveying water is not the only way we use energy throughout the water cycle. Every step along the way from capturing and conveying to treating distributing and treating our waste water uses energy. We use energy to treat water water is treated to drinking water standards through a variety of processes that require energy including filtration, sedimentation, flocculation, disinfection and increasingly reusing ozonation which is even more energy intensive. And over over the years as as we are developing kind of stricter water quality standards the energy used just for this process will also likely increase. This treated water must then be delivered from the water treatment plant to the customer, in some cases this is done by the force of gravity but in other cases it requires a tremendous amount of of energy to pump and pressurize that water to get it to customers. The end user then uses energy to heat, cool, purify and pump water. We uses energy to heat water for our showers or to clean our dishes, in some cases we use energy to purify water for various industrial process and we use energy to pump water in to high-rise buildings or in the hospitals. After we use water water that is used indoors must then be transported to a waste water treatment plant where it undergoes additional processing all of which requires energy. After being processed waste water treatment plant some of that water is further processed and distributed back in to the distribution system but the vast majority of it is returned to the environment either through gravity or through pumping. So in total in this entire process the California energy commission estimates that 19 percent of California's electricity use 33 percent of its non electricity natural gas use and 88 million gallons of diesel consumption are is water related in California. And so to put these numbers in a little bit abstract, less abstract terms think of think of the followings, Many people often leave the faucet running as they are brushing their teeth, flossing, shaving doing any of the number of things, but leaving the faucet running for five minutes uses an equivalent amount of energy as operating a 60 watt light bulb for 14 hours., this is substantially more energy than most people realize with simply turning on the top, except the water to be there, but the energy associated with that water can be very high, and it also varies throughout parts of the state, so in Southern California, the energy associated with that is even higher, where as in other parts of the state, Northern California tends to be a little bit lower. So in total, California's water related energy is about 78 billion kilowatt hours per year, so this is equivalent to the annual electricity use of Colorado and Nevada combined. So clearly too huge amount of energy, an overwhelming 83 percent of that energy, however is a result of customer end use. Keep in mind that it does vary by region and even within a region based up on the current mix and local geography, in Southern California, as I previously mentioned more energy goes to water supply and treatment because that energy again is pumped up and over the Tehachapi I mean in Northern California it is slightly less, but in all cases the largest proportion is end use. So as concerns about kind of water scarcity, population growth and where that growth is occurring, I mean climate change are really forcing us to rethink the relationship between water and energy. And recent legislation is really prompting and will encourage this even further, in September of last year, in September of 2006, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed assembly bill 32, which for those who don't know it's the global warming solutions act, so under that law California has committed to reduce it's green house gas emissions, to 2000 levels by the year 2010, to 1990 levels by the year 2020 and finally to 80 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2050, so the water sector will undoubtedly meet these targets in a variety of ways, they will optimize the efficiency of the existing system by installing newer newer pumps, and they will also increase renewable energy generation, so for example by installing biogas, recovery of waste water treatment plants or putting in solar panels kind of along the property that they manage, many water districts, not only on kind of a variety of way, were the distribution system lies but also on land within the water shed in order to protect it so installing solar panels or other kind of forms of renewable wind turbines if appropriate, they will kind of emboss the amount of renewable energy generation. Our water agencies will also develop less energy intense of local sources, so we will probably see a rise of recycled water, I mean other kind of lower you know ground water, that kind of thing. But giving that end use accounts for such a large portion for 83 percent, both water and energy managers are beginning to look to water conservation and efficiency improvements as means of meeting these targets. So talk a little bit about how we actually use water in California today, and then we focus on urban water use, I will talk a little bit about agricultural water use, probably to the end, in most cases urban water use is much more energy intensive than agricultural water use, but some of our decisions about how we redistribute our cultural water use are very important and have large energy implications but we will come back to that in just a moment. California's urban water use in 2000 about a third of that went for residential indoor use, so that's water to flush our toilets, to wash our clothes and our dishes, about 20 percent of our water goes to outdoor purposes, so that's to put on our lawns, to wash our cars and hopefully not to wash our side walks so that I realize some people like to do that and about 35 percent goes for commercial and industrial purposes and that's to produce our clothes, to manufacture our computer chips, to produce ice at restaurants all these various processes many of us are really aware of use a tremendous amount of water, and over the past 30 years Californian's have really made significant water use in efficiency improvements, a total water use in California in 2000, was actually less than it was in 1975, yet the population increased by 60 percent and the gross state products increased two and a half times, so part of that change is due to changing in our economy, we have changed, we have start producing as much things and we are now kind of turned in and more often to this service sector and typically the service sector uses a less water than the manufacturing sector. But much of this is due to water conservation and efficiency improvements. National efficiency standards for appliances that use water have been really a key element in reducing total water use and many agencies through out California are finding that they are able to meet the needs of their population and actually decrease and in some cases maintain but in many cases, decrease their total water use. You know, back in 1980, six gallon per flush toilets were common through out California. Today we are using about 1.6 gallon the newer toilets any way use 1.6 gallons per flush, although I would argue that we are still a number of the six gallon per flush and even the three and a half gallon per flush toilet still in use. Shower heads, back in the early part early 80s and even in the 90s were using five to seven gallons per minute. Today, based on efficiency standards, it require to be two and a half gallons per minute. And although there are many new technologies to decrease use further you know, - well there are many technologies I should say to reduce this further and that in the next coming years these will become more common and therefore we have the opportunity to reduce our use even further. Despite these improvements, California's current water use remains wasteful. At the pacific institute we undertook a study in 2003 called "Waste Not, Want Not" and the potential for urban water conservation in California and we looked at what current use was and by current, I am using 2000 as the base year, and where how much water we could be using. If everyone in California was using a 1.6 gallon per flush toilet, a low flow shower head. If people were using some of the newer technologies to water their lawns, some of the technologies that deliver water based on tough water requirement or grass water requirements rather than simply flooding their lawns. And we also looked out you know, what's the potential for reducing use in the commercial and industrial sector. And what we found was pretty amazing that the potential water savings is still today we could reduce water use by 33 percent over what it was in over current years by installing many of these current existing technologies. And significant savings are available on every sector from the residential to the commercial and industrial. In a recent study, the California energy commission took the pacific institute's "Waste Not, Want Not" results, so looked at how much water could be saved by becoming more efficient and quantify the energy savings that's associated with those improvements. So the energy commission found that these water use efficiency programs could produce could reduce energy use by 6.5 billion kilo watt hours at a cost of 826 million. Having compared this to how much energy could be saved by some of the kind of existing traditional energy efficiency programs. They found that these traditional energy efficiency programs could reduce energy use by about 6.8 billion kilo watt hours at a cost of 1.5 billion. So when you look at the cost per kilo watt hour, so for the energy efficiency programs, it's about 22 cents per kilo watt hour, whereas the water use efficiency programs could produce those savings at much less cost. So on total the the energy commission concluded that 95 percent of the savings of that water use efficiency programs could deliver 95 percent of their savings as traditional energy efficiency programs at 55 percent of the costs. So if a state or water utility or even an energy utility has 50 or $100 million to invest in reducing energy use but it will get much more bank for the block by investing in water used efficiency programs than investing in traditional energy efficiency programs. Additionally, many of the water conservation devices also save the consumer money, so considered to washing machines; we kind of have the conventional a new conventional top loading clothes washer costs about $450. We also have today, some of the front loading clothes washers which use much less water but are a little bit more expensive say that's $750. Over the life of the device, if we look strictly at water costs and water savings, it's not efficient to install the front loading clothes washer, okay. But when we include, the energy cost the energy savings from the clothes washers are very high, so that over the life time, the consumer would actually be saving money. In this case over a $100, rising energy cost are forcing many agencies and individuals to begin and valuating the energy implications of their water management decisions, concerns about climate change and potential limitations on green house gas emissions is going to further push that along. I would like to draw your attention to the Santa Clara valley water district, Santa Clara valley water district based in the south part of San Francesco bay has shown tremendous leadership and really trying to better understand the connections between water and energy, and we had the workshop back in August of 2005, which they pulled together many of the different water and waste water agencies, to try to really find kind of places where they could reduce energy use, but also not impact services to their customers, and they also are among the first agency to really quantify the energy savings resulting from their water conservation and recycle of water programs, they estimate that between 1992 and 2006 that these programs have reduced their energy use by about 1.42 billion kilowatt hours, which is equivalent to the annual electricity use of 207 households, so clearly this has - has tremendous potential to reduce energy use, and well excuse me I have spent much of the time - much of this talk really focused on urban water use, that agriculture sector in California actually uses about 80 percent of the water and farmers are increasingly installing trip and sprinkler the irrigation both of which may actually increase energy use, so with both trip and sprinkling irrigation farmers will need to pressurize the systems a bit and this may or may not increase energy, some of that increase may be partially or completely offset by reductions in ground water pumping, or surface water deliveries or fertilizer application, but the net effect depends in part on a number of factors, including kind of local geography and where that water ultimately goes, so for - if the water we are saving is going to say an urban an urban area, it could be actually increasing the energy use associated with that water, a case study of potatoes in Columbia river basin provides a really interesting example that I think will help people understand that they have very complex relationship between water and energy particularly in the agricultural sector so the Columbia river basin is located in the North west part of the United States and it extends from parts of Canada down through Montano and Idaho and across Oregon and Washington, potatoes are a key crop that are grown in the region, and particularly upstream of some of the hydroelectric generation, and so in our report entitled - it is available in lobbing called energy down the drain this is a report about the pacific institute and the natural resources defense council role back in 2004, they looked at what the energy intensity was associated with the water used for growing crops in this basin, what they found that is very interesting, they found that about a quarter of the energy associated with potato production is due to source and conveyance, so that's due to pumping ground water, taking ground water from the stream, in this case taking ground water from the stream, but and delivering it to the farms, they also found that the cultivation - planting, cultivation and harvest of these farms accounts for another 25 percent a quarter of it, all what's most interesting is they found that diversions that occur upstream of hydroelectric generation actually result in lost hydro power and so some of the energy associated with using that water on these farms is lost hydropower some thing that most people wouldn't necessarily consider when they were thinking about the energy implications, so in conclusion I hope to demonstrate it to you that water and energy are tightly linked, but that these links are purely understood or used in policy although although are becoming increasingly so, that water management must really be a critical element of any long term efforts to reduce green house gas emissions and that the good news is that many of these savings can be done at lower cost than traditional energy efficiency programs particularly in the urban sector, so with that I would be happy to take any questions, I would like to point out that in the lobby as well as on online, we have a number of reports that address some of the issues I brought up including energy down the drain and "Waste not, Want not" and these can be found on our website at www.perkins.org. Thank you.
