Regional
Sierra Citizen: License to Flow
Author: Eric Winford for The Sierra Citizen
Published on Sep 29, 2007, 09:15

In 1850, the Rock Creek Ditch Company built a nine-mile canal, the first canal of any significant length in California. The investors in this tiny Nevada County company recouped their money in six weeks by selling the water to miners with claims along the canal's length. Thus began the great hydrologic reworking that, 150 years later, moves water from the Bear and Yuba watersheds hundreds of miles from its origins through a canal into a dam, through a turbine into another canal, through other turbines, and out of a faucet in any number of cities and farms throughout Nevada and Placer Counties.

The system that moves this water around is one of the most complex in the state, if not the country. "I have never heard of anything more complicated," Ron Nelson, General Manager of the Nevada Irrigation District, says.

NID and Pacific Gas & Electric are responsible for the majority of the dams and canals that gather the waters of the Middle Yuba, the South Yuba, the Bear, and the North Fork of the North Fork of the American River. The Placer County Water Agency (PCWA) and the Yuba County Water Agency also maintain some facilities in the watershed. The water is used for irrigation, consumption, and hydropower.

In 2013, the federal license to use the water for hydropower, issued in 1964 to NID and PG&E, will expire. As part of the relicensing process, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) will review the benefits and consequences of the Drum/Spaulding and Bear/Yuba hydropower projects, and decide how much water should flow through those turbines. The license will also determine how much water should be released to the rivers. The process to renew that license has already begun.

Not all Precipitation is Created Equally

Rain is not shed upon the Sierra Nevada equally. Precipitation in the northern counties of Sierra and Plumas average 70-80 inches per year. Moving south, that amount steadily drops, so Nevada County averages 60-70 inches and Placer 55-65 inches. Over the width and breadth of the range, the total precipitation equals 20 million acre-feet per year.

In the higher reaches of the range, the precipitation falls as snow, a convenient method of storage that delivers sudden pulses as well as sustained releases of water. The pulse will peak in spring as rain falls on snow. After spring, the rivers steadily lose flow as the snowpack slowly releases its water. Lower down, winter rains fill creeks instantly.

The Bear and the South Yuba, with respective watersheds of 292 and 352 square miles, have an estimated average runoff of 272,800 and 323,000 acre-feet. The location of that water-far from major population centers-and the steepness of the terrain-the South Yuba drops 96.4 feet every mile-encouraged the building of dams and canals in these watersheds. The system humans devised shows that man was not content to let water be used just once. Using the available topography, canals drop water from one hydro plant to another, making it possible for a single drop of water to spin seven turbines along its course to a farmer's field.

Water from the Sierra Nevada built California, fueling the gold mines in the late 1800s, providing the basis for the agriculture boom of the early 1900s, creating the era of dam building and cheap electricity of the 1950s, and now providing sprawling towns in the foothills with drinking water.

The Yuba-Bear Hydropower Project

Water from the Yuba-Bear system PG&E and NID powerhouses provides 1.15 million mega-watt hours of electricity annually. The electricity generated from NID turbines is sold to PG&E. Hydropower revenues support NID's infrastructure. The revenues "underwrite the costs of those systems, the operation and maintenance of those dams and reservoirs, and profits after that go back to the district," Nelson said.

Of the 16 powerhouses under this license, 13 produce less than 30 MWh and are thus considered to be small hydro projects. Small hydro projects can be counted as part of a utility's Renewable Portfolio Standard; state law requires utilities to have 20 percent of their energy provided by renewable sources by 2017.

Irrigation was and continues to be the main use of water from the Yuba-Bear system, comprising over 80 percent of water deliveries. However, domestic demand for water is growing, and NID currently has seven treatment plants.

"The agriculture economy was the first need," Nelson says. "As the years have gone on the community's needs have changed and we added treated water as one of the services."

But before California cities can consume that water it has to be gathered. PG&E and NID are the inheritors of a water conveyance system that is over 150 years old.

"While it might have been pieced together 100 years ago, its quite an amazing bit of engineering," Nelson says of the Yuba-Bear system.

The Origins of the Yuba-Bear System

The system developed for carrying the water of the Sierra Nevada was created in the mid 18th century with hydraulic mining. Dams, ditches, and canals stored and moved water in order to blast away dirt and rock. The Rock Creek Ditch Company was the first to show moving water was profitable, but larger companies such as the South Yuba Canal Company soon appeared and prospered. By 1858, the South Yuba Canal Company maintained 450 miles of ditches.

Hydrologic mining boomed in the following decades, but its success proved its downfall. The erosion of such large amounts of soil caused immense problems downstream, resulting in an 1884 court decision (the "Sawyer Decision") to halt the practice. Losing their most important consumer, the companies owning water rights and canals began seeking new revenue. Domestic use was small, irrigation was growing, but the next juicy contract was for electrical power.

Once again, the Yuba watershed became the scene for major technological breakthroughs. The first hydroelectric plant in the Yuba system was built in 1892 outside Nevada City. Alta dam, the oldest dam still in use in California, was built in 1902 to take water from Placer County's Canyon Creek and place it in the Bear River system.

PG&E and NID are Born

In 1905, two large power companies merged to form PG&E, whose inheritance included the mass of canals constructed by the South Yuba Canal Company and others in the mining boom; more importantly, though, they inherited the associated water rights.

NID came into existence in 1921, purchasing some of PG&E's water rights and gathering others from various owners. The cooperation PG&E offered to the local governmental agency is a remarkable-though not unprecedented-act in California's often vicious water history.

It stems from the different functions of their charter. "They [PG&E] are not a consumptive user; their mission is power production and our mission is consumptive, so there's no competition in that respect," Nelson says. "We're interested in moving water around; they're interested in power for production. It's those facts that make it easy to work together."

In 1963, the two entities agreed that more water storage was necessary for their interlinked system. The increased storage would serve growing towns, an increasing agriculture economy, and provide electricity to a power-hungry state.

"Because they had the canals and infrastructure, it was natural to add hydropower to the mix," Nelson says. The cost to NID for these improvements was $65 million.

The hydropower plants were licensed in 1964 by FERC. It is this license that is now under review. The license covers only a part of the entire infrastructure within these watersheds, but the part it covers is immense. NID's permit lists four powerhouses, nine on-stream reservoirs, three off-stream impoundments, and two diversion dams. PG&E's permit lists 12 hydropower facilities and 29 reservoirs.

The contract that governs the transfer of water between NID and PG&E is based upon their water rights. These rights are more precious than gold because they determine who has the legal right to the use water on a particular stretch of stream. California's water rights evolved from a system the miners used where senior rights trump junior rights.

"In Western water law, priority is significant; first in time, first in line," Nelson says.

In order to get their water, PG&E and NID have created a mutually dependent system over the hundreds of miles of watershed between the upper reaches of the Middle Yuba and the small creeks of Western Placer County.

"We share some of our facilities; we run some of our water through systems they own, and they store water in systems we own," Nelson says.

The Altered Dynamics of Our Watershed

Many of the tributaries to the South Yuba are gathered and put into a canal that takes the water to Lake Spaulding.

"Human uses have drastically altered the natural flows of the Yuba and Bear watersheds," Katrina Schneider, SYRCL River Scientist, says. "Many of the South Yuba tributaries intercepted and diverted by the Bowman-Spaulding canal have zero flow requirements (i.e., 0 cubic feet per second), while the canal can transport up to 350 cfs to Spaulding reservoir. The cumulative result is an array of dry river beds and a substantial amount of water transported out of the South Yuba River."

From Lake Spaulding, water is divided into three directions: into the Drum Canal heading toward the Bear River, along the South Yuba Canal to Deer Creek, and into the South Yuba River.

"Spaulding and Englebright are the only dams on the South Yuba, so you have a long section that's not chopped up," says Dave Steindorf, California Stewardship Director for American Whitewater. This unbroken stretch of river, and the few streams that empty into it, create a viable, though diminished, ecosystem.

"If you put water in the top, you have the potential to rewater the whole system; that's good news for river restoration," Steindorf says.

Additional river flow can create more aquatic habitat as well as provide colder instream water temperatures, which benefits aquatic species and their life stages. "Yuba river native trout and amphibians have low temperature tolerances and require cold water to grow and reproduce," adds Gary Reedy, SYRCL's RiverScience Director and fish biologist. "The bad news is that any water that gets out of Spaulding, PG&E waves goodbye to it; that's going to be very expensive water because they don't get to put it through their dams," Stendorf continues.

The Bear River: Workhorse of California

Moving nine miles from Spaulding to its terminus, the Drum Canal carries an amount of water roughly equal to the natural flow of the South Yuba; however, the water isn't placed into the Bear River.

"There is a huge amount of water imported into the Bear watershed from South Yuba," Julie Liembach of the Foothills Water Network says. "But the majority of the water doesn't spend any time in the natural channel; it is kept in channels above the river to be dropped from penstocks to create electricity. The actual natural channel has very little water that spends time there."

There are six powerhouses and seven reservoirs on the Bear River.

"The Bear is the workhorse of the system," Liembach said. "It has so many facilities on it and so many diversions that there are sections of it that are severely dewatered."

Water from the Yuba and the Bear eventually makes it to NID and PCWA users. Some of that water is put into natural stream channels, such as Auburn Ravine, Dry Creek, and others in Western Placer County. These creeks, which used to run dry in late summer, now contain a healthy ecosystem supporting salmon and trout fisheries. One of the questions in the relicensing process will be how to balance the protection of current resources while working to restore other resources.

Relicensing Questions and Concerns

The FERC relicensing process requires studies of the impacts of the hydropower facilities. Some of those study questions will focus on desirable releases of water to rivers.

"The major problem that we're working on is that the water temperatures are too high for native fish," Liembach says. "We don't have the ecological flows to have fish passage, as well as the temperature."

Reworking the timing of water releases could modify the system enough to provide sufficient flows for aquatic life.

"There is a great potential to provide colder water releases in river reaches through managing, preserving, and utilizing current cold water pools in project reservoirs and other actions," Schneider says.

But exactly what the right ecological flow is unknown.

"Many of these rivers so rarely have flows that we don't know much about them, and part of this process is to find out what's out there," Steindorf says.

Another question will be water quality. California's legacy of mining has severely polluted many waterways with mercury.

"The reservoirs are collecting sediment, and mercury collects in the sediment," Liembach says.

Improving recreation on the rivers will also be on the list.

"It's a huge area, and within that area is contained what is already known to be the best whitewater resources in California," Steindorf says. "The good news is that what's really going to be the best for boaters is going to be the best for the biota."

Recreation can bring in revenue, but Steindorf doesn't see the question of new recreation revenue replacing hydro revenue as a valid one.

"One of the questions is, does the revenue generated from recreation replace the revenue generated by hydro? The answer is no, but we're not looking at a direct comparison," he says. "We don't have a good way to value those resources appropriately. It's easy to calculate values in terms of kilowatt hours, but what is the value of being able to walk down the South Yuba and look at a healthy river system instead of a dry riverbed?"

A Once in a Lifetime Opportunity

"It's a public resource," Steindorf continues. "That's why the FERC relicensing process exists, because they don't own the water. Rivers are considered to be part of the public trust."

In relicensing, the public gets to decide what the benefits should be.

"I think of it as a once in a lifetime opportunity to restore aquatic habitat and recreational benefits," Liembach says. "This is a huge opportunity to change the hydropower system so it takes into account the protection of those benefits."

Reprinted with permission from The Sierra Citizen. For more information and the complete edition, visit SYRCL.org

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