By Kennedy Maize
The Trump administration’s Interior Department April 17 took steps to add and redistribute water in the drought-stricken Colorado River system, largely aimed at protecting hydro-electric generation from Lake Powell behind the Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Meade behind Hoover Dam.
Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation is ordering a major withdrawal of water from the Flaming Gorge reservoir in Wyoming and a bit of Utah in order to increase the flows into the Colorado River behind the two dams. Flaming Gorge is the largest reservoir in Wyoming, one of the four “upper basin” states in the 1922 seven-state Colorado River Compact. It is a major part of the Colorado River Storage Project.
The withdrawals are scheduled to begin this week.
Operating under a temporary agreement among the seven states, Interior is ordering release from Flaming Gorge into the Colorado of 600,000 to 1 million acre feet of water through April 2027. BuRec says it also intends “to reduce the annual release volume from Lake Powell to Lake Mead” by 1.48 million acre feet —from 7.48 to 6.0 million acre feet through September 2026.
Flaming Gorge now holds about 3.1 million acre feet of water, according to BuRec, 83% of full capacity.”These actions are expected to lower the reservoir’s elevation by roughly 35 feet over the next year to approximately 59% of capacity,” the Interior agency said. “This will have no effect on contracted water rights at Flaming Gorge or Lake Powell. No additional releases from the other upstream initial units of the Colorado River Storage Project Act—Blue Mesa and Navajo reservoirs—are planned at this time, due to their low water levels and poor forecasted inflows.”
Without the releases, Glen Canyon Dam’s hydropower intakes could be above water, shutting down the plant entirely. The hydropower system has a nameplate capacity of 1.3-GW, although it has a capacity factor of about 40%, reflecting the vagaries of the river flow. If the water level falls even further, it could structurally damage the base of the 719-foot high concrete arch dam, which went into service in 1966 after 112 years of construction, controversially inundating a spectacular canyon. The dam reached full capacity in 1980.
The dam was built after a long battle with environmentalists, led by the legendary David Brower (1912-2000), head of the Sierra Club and later founder of Friends of the Earth. His battles with then powerful BuRec director Floyd Dominy (1910-2010) produced an iconic 1971 book by New Yorker writer and Princeton journalism professor John McPhee, 95, “Encounters with the Archdruid.”
The reduced flows from Glen Canyon into Lake Meade will cut the hydro output of 90-year-old Hoover Dam, built between 1931 and 1936 on the Black Canyon of the Colorado, by as much as 40%. The Hoover Dam hydro system has a nameplate capacity of 2-GW, but a capacity factor of 18%. In 2020, according to the Las Vegas Sun, citing BuRec figures, the dam generated 3.3 billion kilowatt hours.
BuRec says the reduced flow from the Glen Canyon dam adds “up to an additional 40% reduction to Hoover Dam’s hydropower generating capacity as early as this fall.” That’s going to hit the three lower basin states (Nevada, Arizona, and California) in the 1922 federal Colorado River Compact, the major consumers of the water and Hoover Dam’s electricity.
That means money. The Las Vegas Review-Journal observed “The announcement underscores a problem that rural, urban and tribal utilities across Nevada, California and Arizona have been grappling with — aging turbines cannot accommodate low reservoir levels, and a lack of accessible funding means officials may have to look elsewhere to meet their power needs.
“If we go out to the market and purchase these other resources, it’s at a higher price,” said Dane Bradfield, general manager of the Lincoln County Power District No. 1, which serves a rural Southern Nevada county northeast of Las Vegas with about 2,000 largely agricultural users. “Unfortunately, those prices are passed on to our customers.”
Interior’s move is only a short-term response to a long-term problem the Trump administration has been ducking for almost a year: the need to come up with a new long-term compact deal. The 2007 20-year agreement runs out this fall. Interior has known about that since early in the Trump administration, but keeps kicking the watering can down the road. Interior has repeatedly set deadlines for the seven states to reach agreement or it would impose a new compact arrangement. As each deadline has passed, DOI has offered a new red line.
In its announcement of the Flaming Gorge releases, Interior was at it again. The BuRec announcement ends, “With time running out, there is a need for extraordinary collaboration for 2027 and beyond. In the absence of a consensus and following the completion of the NEPA process, the Interior Department will be prepared to determine operations for Post 2026 later this summer to provide certainty and stability for the Colorado River Basin.”
In the meantime, BuRec continues to be without a permanent, Senate-confirmed head of the agency, which greatly complicates its ability to broker a new deal. While the compact states are regionally divided, with the two basins having substantially different agendas, they are also politically divided. Of the seven states, upper basin Colorado and New Mexico are Democratic blue while Wyoming and Utah are Republican red, while lower basin California is blue and Nevada and Arizona are purple.
As the midterm elections approach, the Colorado River compact could complicate the politics of the already complicated regional divisions.