By Kennedy Maize
Lake Powell, created by the flow of the Colorado River held back by the 1980 Glen Canyon Dam, could soon reach a water supply crisis, according to a new analysis by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation. The same outcome could then face Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead, downstream from Lake Powell.
In both cases, a major impact could be to limit or end hydropower production from both dams, 1,320-MW for Glen Canyon and 2,000-MW for Hoover Dam.
In typically downplayed language, BuRec’s “June 2026 Most Probable 24-month Study” says, “The observed unregulated inflow into Lake Powell for the month of May was 0.383 maf [million acre-feet] or 18% of the 30-year average from 1991 to 2020. The June 2026 unregulated inflow forecast for Lake Powell is 0.170 maf or 7% of the 30-year average.”
Those figures mean that Lake Powell’s water level by early next year could decline to “minimum power pool,” a threshold. If water levels drop below that, water won’t be able to flow through the dam’s hydro turbines.
A study this month by a team of hydrologists for the University of Colorado Law School concluded, “Another dry year brings the system dangerously close to crashing (i.e., run-of-the-river operations), and a wet year provides only a temporary reprieve. Without significant reductions in use throughout the Basin, water users will no longer derive any benefit from the extensive and expensively-constructed Colorado River reservoir system, intended to bring reliable water supplies and associated prosperity to the southwestern United States.”
The lead author of the study was Anne Castle, senior fellow at the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment at the law school. From 2022 to 2025, she served as U.S. Commissioner and Chair of the Upper Colorado River Commission. She was Interior’s Assistant Secretary for Water and Science from 2009 to 2014.
Earlier this year, BuRec ordered a diversion of water from Wyoming’s large Flaming Gorge reservoir into the river, aimed at keeping the water in Lake Powell to over 3,500 feet above sea level. Castle told the Denver Post following BuRec’s latest “Most Probable” study, “We’re going to get to 3,500 of elevation (at Powell) this year, and we’re going to stay there for a while, unless we get snowmaggedon.”
The law school study found, “If the Colorado River Basin (Basin) experiences another dry year, similar to Water Year 2025, it is likely that reasonably accessible storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead would be mostly depleted, even if consumptive uses and losses are at or near historic lows. Run-of-the-river operations would shortly ensue. This would be an outcome with devastating consequences.
“In contrast, if next year is very wet, similar to Water Year 2023, the Basin’s largest federal reservoirs would recover somewhat, but would provide only about two years of cushion before we find ourselves again in the same position we are in today, unless consumptive use decreases further. This recovery would be welcome but would provide only a brief reprieve from crisis.”
In the meantime, Interior is treading political water, huffing and puffing about forcing the action by the seven states in the 1922 Colorado River Commission. The four upper-basin states — Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico — provide most of the river water and three lower-basin consuming states — Nevada, Arizona, and California — are regionally polarized. A largely feckless BuRec has imposed repeated “deadlines” for the states to resolve their differences, to no effect.
As a voluntary resolution has failed, Interior has repeatedly threatened to impose a solution. Then they have backed away. The threats turned into a politically fraught tactic as the November midterm elections are hanging over the Trump administration, which doesn’t want to give the compact state voters additional reasons to reject Republican governance.
BuRec has been without a Senate-confirmed commissioner for the entire second Trump administration. On June 9, Politico’s E&E News reported that the White House intends to nominate Aubrey Bettencourt as commissioner. She is serving as acting commissioner. She had been in the Agriculture Department as head of the Natural Resources Conservation Service. The BuRec nomination had not gone forward as of June 24.
A Californian, Bettencourt has ties to the state’s agricultural businesses. During the first Trump administration, she was a deputy assistant secretary at Interior, working on water and science policy. E&E News commented, “It’s a move that sidesteps the seven-state brawl over the drought-withered Colorado River that has given the Trump administration a litany of political headaches and led to the withdrawal of the administration’s first nominee for Reclamation, a long-time Arizona water hand who had drawn opposition from powerful Republican officials in Utah and Wyoming.”
Should the administration be unable to come up with a new multi-year plan for the operation of the Colorado River Compact, which appears likely, the only hope for the river system appears to be weather.
And the next step beyond “minimum power pool” if the two-decades long regional drought continues could be “dead pool,” defined as “when water in a reservoir drops so low that it can’t flow downstream from the dam.”
The Quad Report, covering energy policy and politics