Battle over Little Lake heats up

The latest round in the battle between a private hunting club and a geothermal plant for control of an Owens Valley aquifer got underway today with the release of a 900-page final environmental impact report.

The report predicts that the Coso Geothermal Plant’s plan to extract 4,800 acre feet of water per year from the aquifer and construct a nine-mile pipeline could have a significant impact on  Little Lake Ranch, a 1,200-acre retreat on spring-fed wetlands adjacent to U.S. Highway 395 and east of the Sierra’s tallest peaks.

The project could also lead to the spread of invasive species and harm threatened and endangered animals, including the desert tortoise.

The report also points out, however, that Coso plans to implement an array of mitigation measures and to stop pumping if regional water levels fall too low.

That’s not good enough for opponents led by the 50-year-old hunting club, made up mostly of Southern California doctors, lawyers and business owners. Little Lake Ranch  argues the project would suck Little Lake dry, wiping out foraging grounds for migrating waterfowl in a place held sacred by Native Americans and surrounded by lava cliffs festooned with vivid petroglyphs.

The club’s concerns are based, in part, on a hydrology model included in the report, which shows that the Coso project could siphon off as much as 10% of Little Lake’s water in less than a year and half.

“It could easily mean the end of a lake that has been around 10,000 years,” said Little Lake Ranch attorney Gary Arnold. “It would take more than a century for the aquifer on which Little Lake relies to recover from just 14 months of groundwater pumping at a rate of 4,800 acre feet per year.”

Coso officials were unavailable for comment, and Inyo County authorities declined comment pending public hearings on the matter.

In the meantime, opponents have recommended alternatives to groundwater pumping, including technological enhancements at the power plant, where steam-driven turbines already provide electricity to more than 250,000 homes.

The Inyo County Planning Commission is expected to act in January on Coso’s request for a 30-year permit to extract aquifer water it says is needed to supplement its own diminishing geothermal reservoirs. The Inyo County Board of Supervisors will make a final determination later.

Water has long been a sensitive subject in this region, about 160 miles north of Los Angeles.
After the Lower Owens River’s water was diverted into the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, the river’s massive catch basin, Owens Lake, evaporated into vast salt flats prone to sending up choking dust storms.

Later, after groundwater pumping by Los Angeles between 1970 and 1990 destroyed additional habitat in the Owens Valley, L.A. agreed to restore the Lower Owens River to compensate for the damage.
That restoration project, however, continues to be disputed in Inyo County Superior Court.

-- Louis Sahagun

Photo: Little Lake, in the Owens Valley. Credit: Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times.

Comments

[sheila]

this is going to be an ongoing problem with all this geothermal they are claiming is "baseload" power, as well as with Concentrating Solar Power, which uses a minumum of 90,000 gallons/watt/year for air-cooled plants and an additional 2 MILLION gallons of water per watt per year for the more-efficient water-cooled plants. water is too scarce to be wasted on energy production when we live in a ridiculously sunny state that is over-developed already.

rooftop solar will solve a vast amount of our energy needs without wasting our precious water, killing off our wilderness areas (lakes, deserts, plains, mountain passes, etc.), or building out monopolies when we should have a democratic system now.

please push for generous feed in tariffs (40 countries successfully use this means of paying regular people like us for the clean power we feed into the grid from our properties), for AB 811 financing (your city or county should make funding available to you at very low cost so you can install a PV or microwind system on your home or business, which you repay through property taxes - which means the system is tax deductible!).

we need to stop the Big Energy juggernaut before it bankrupts all of us and kills our planet - quite literally. Big Geo, Big Wind and Big Solar are more of the same, and we DON'T NEED THEM TO DO THIS RIGHT. the grid should be a load-balancing distribution and billing system, not a monopolistic generator of 100% of our power, externalizing all its costs onto us (and our planet), and privatizing all our profits. those days are over!

by the time we get all the rooftop installations in place, all these promising energy storage systems will be ready to use, and we can move to phase 2. thanks!