Photo courtesy of SAWS

SAWS President and CEO Robert Puente says San Antonio could be a model for water conservation the rest of the state.

San Antonio is something of a poster-child for smarter water use in Texas. The city has reduced its per-capita water usage by 42 percent over the last few decades, despite one of the fastest-growing populations in the country. At the 2012 Texas Water Summit at the University of Texas at Austin’s Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science Monday, Robert Puente, the President and CEO of the San Antonio Water System offered some insight to San Antonio’s success and how the city weathered the drought.

Water conservation was the foundation for the city’s efforts, Puente says. The San Antonio Water System (SAWS) now serves over 1.6 million people, but despite a sixty-seven percent increase in population, the city has witnessed little to no increase in water use. How? Puente largely credits this feat to an arsenal of conservation programs. San Antonio has relied on what Puente calls “the three-legged stool”: education and outreach, reasonable regulation through effective city ordinances, and healthy financial investment towards conservation efforts.

“Our business model is to convince our customers to buy less of our product,” says Puente. Like the Plumbers to People program, an initiative to retrofit toilets. The cumulative effect of these conservation efforts was the conservation of more than 120,000 acre-feet of water — an $84 million savings over the course of last summer.

The efforts of the San Antonio Water System, however, haven’t stopped at improving the efficiency of bathrooms.

Photo by Paul Kane/Getty Images

While conservation has certainly provided the basis for San Antonio’s water success, it isn’t the only factor. The city now meets approximately sixteen percent of its total water demand using recycled water. Big companies in the area, like Toyota and Microsoft, are now some of the largest consumers of these recycled water products.

In addition to water recycling, San Antonio has also started something called biosolid composting, a gas-to-energy process where digester gas from factories is sent back into the market as a source of energy for thirty billion gallons worth of water storage services, and brackish water desalination. Puente says that this diversification of water resources has served the community of San Antonio well and may just provide a model of action for the rest of Texas.

While some Texas towns ran dry during the drought, or came close to doing so, one community has been living without water regardless of how much rain falls in the state. In a rural subdivision less than ten miles outside of Austin, some thirty families live without running water. Most of them are low-income and don’t speak English. Andy Uhler of KUT reports the first of three stories in a series on the community of Las Lomitas. (You can also watch a video story above by KUT’s Jeff Heimsath.)

• The Story of Las LomitasHow One Texas Community Lives Without WaterDownload

More from his story:

“Driving up the dirt road to Norma Escalante’s trailer home, you pass a string of double-wides in varying states of disrepair. Her yard is dotted with odds and ends: an old tube TV, a rusted-over kitchen range perched beside the front door, and the skeleton of a burned-down trailer that’s been converted into a chicken coop.

Inside the home, a couple of sofas with red slipcovers flank a big-screen TV. The ceiling is cracked and stained from water leaks. Norma, her husband and their 9-year old son have lived here for five years.

“I like living out here, I do,” Norma said. “But not having water here, in the United States, in the city — it’s like ridiculous.””

You can read the full story at KUT.

Photo courtesy of the University of Texas at Austin

Dr. Danny Reible will chair the 2012 Texas Water Summit.

Water, water everywhere. Let’s keep some drops to drink. But how? That’s why scientists, politicians, and water utility leaders are meeting up today for the 2012 Texas Water Summit from the University of Texas at Austin’s Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science. It will feature prominent statewide leaders on water issues like state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, San Antonio Water System’s CEO Robert Puente and Robert Mace of the Texas Water Development Board.

To get a preview of the summit, StateImpact Texas’ Terrence Henry talked to its director, Danny Reible. He works at the University of Texas’s Center for Research in Water Resources. He is also the program chair for the summit. The interview was edited for clarity and content.

Q: Tell us about what people can expect from this conference.

A: The Texas Water Summit is an effort to explore the consequence of our drought. What is our availability of water? What are our needs for water? And ultimately how can we match the gap between the two now and in the future?

Q: What are some of the issues you’ll be looking at?

A: Some of the big questions are the uncertainty in the availability in water. As we move forward, as a result of potential climate change, what might that do to the frequency of drought, for example? And then, to what extent, as we look at the growth and the population of the state, can we conserve water and reuse water in municipalities? That’s certainly a significant fraction of our water use today but as we are nearly doubling in population, or expected to nearly double in population in the next fifty years, what can we really expect out of conservation and reuse and the pressure on water demand by municipalities? I suspect that, in fact, our municipalities or cities are going to have an increase in water usage even if we do an awful lot of reuse and conservation. Just the population growth will mean that, at best, we’ll probably stay even. And so that when we’re faced with drought, we’re going to have problems. And how do we match up that water that we have? Where do we conserve in other areas? Are there sources of water, new sources that we can tap into? So these are the issues that we are going to be addressing in this one-day conference.

Q: We’ve been getting a lot of questions about whether or not the drought is over, along the lines of ‘Did we make it through this drought? If so, do we really need to worry about more in the future?’

A: That’s actually the worry that I have, is that if we have made it through the drought, and it’s certainly a promising year so far, that people will become less concerned. And that is the traditional view that we’ve had for planning for water in Texas. That is, we pray that it will rain. Well, I would say that last year we recognized that that is not a plan. And that we need to be a little more proactive – we need to be a lot more proactive –  in how we manage water and see it into the future. And so we don’t know whether the drought is over, and I would hope that even if it is over, that we don’t forget that we need to be much more proactive in our planning for water into the future.

Q: Are there important issues that are being left out of the discussion about water usage in Texas?

A: I believe that we probably are not talking as much as we should about some of the largest users of water and how we can help those users conserve that water. And the two largest users are agricultural irrigation and cities. So even though there is a lot of discussion about how we can improve efficiencies in both, because of their prominence and overall use of water — we’re talking approximately 85 percent of our total water demand are those two alone. I don’t think we spend enough time discussing how we can conserve better in those two areas.

Q: It also seems like an area ripe for conflict – growing cities versus farming and ranching.

A: I think there is a potential for conflict, and I believe that ultimately what this will do is put an upward demand or upward pressure on the cost of water, which will encourage conservation on both sides. But as the cost for water goes up, that provides opportunities for those that have water rights that are dependent on relatively cheap water, they might find it more useful to actually sell that water to municipalities, for example. There will be conflict. There will be certainly difficulties in redistributing water and meeting the efficiencies and everyone getting what they would like out of our water supply. But I think there are opportunities, and through things such as our forum, we’re trying hard to pull all the stakeholders together so that we can try to identify what our common needs and challenges might be.

Daniel Ramirez is an intern with StateImpact Texas.

Dave Fehling/StateImpact Texas

Keeping the lights on at home in Houston as state regulators debate letting power companies make bigger profits

The three members of the Texas Public Utility Commission (PUC) seem in agreement that the cap on the peak price for wholesale power should be raised. They’ll likely finalize a massive increase this summer.

Then, the big question: will it encourage power generating companies to build more plants in Texas as intended? Or will it only encourage profit-taking and possibly even market manipulation?

• ‘You’re carting away money, not in wheelbarrows, but in Mack trucks’Debating how to fund more power plantsDownload

At a meeting of the PUC April 12, there was disagreement over how to implement a higher cap on the price allowed on the spot market, typically a factor in extreme weather when power use surges. The current cap has been tripled in recent years and is now the highest in the nation at $3,000 per megawatt/hour (during normal times, the price per megawatt/hour can be $50 or less). The commissioners are considering raising the cap to $4,500 this summer and to $9,000 by 2015.

Texas PUC

Texas PUC Chairman Donna Nelson

“What we’re trying to fix is, the prices in the wholesale market are not high enough to attract investment. Would you agree with that?” asked PUC Chairman Donna Nelson to commissioner Kenneth Anderson.

“Well, I’m not sure they are. I’m not sure I agree now. They have jumped, just the changes we’ve made if you look at the averages…”,  responded Anderson.

Anderson detailed what he figured was the spread between average prices and what would happen if the $3,000 capped-price kicked in on the hottest summer days when demand spikes.

“You’re carting away money, not in wheelbarrows, but in Mack trucks,” Anderson said.

But that’s the theory behind dramatically raising the price cap: if the Texas electricity market is seen as lucrative and a good bet for profits, investors will be willing to fund the construction of new power plants. The state has warned that with a growing population, power generating capacity is not keeping up.

Texas PUC

Texas PUC commissioner Kenneth Anderson

“And the longer we wait for investment, the clearer it is we’re going to have a problem having enough electricity,” said the PUC’s Nelson.

When Texas lawmakers “deregulated” the market for electricity in 1999, they left it up to free enterprise to build new power plants. Other states impose fees or taxes to gradually raise money to fund new plants. And therein lies a problem according to one nationally prominent utility consultant.

“Texas is the only state in the U.S. that has this curious system,” said Robert McCullough, of McCullough Research in Portland, Oregon.

“What has happened since Texas adopted these rules? Nobody’s built any capacity.”

McCullough contends that by raising the price cap so dramatically, it will only encourage power companies to not build more generating capacity. He said if companies keep supplies tight, they can profit more by taking advantage of the sky-high prices when demand spikes.

“Not only are we creating an incentive not to build new plants, we’re creating an incentive that might lead some traders to create artificial shortages. Now, that sounds like a conspiracy theory and it is a bit, but it’s not as if it’s a conspiracy theory that we haven’t seen before,” said McCullough, referring to incidents in California, Texas and  New York where there have been allegations that energy traders manipulated the market to drive up prices.

McCullough said Texas already has higher electricity prices than most of its neighbors (see his graph below). He predicts the higher price cap would make Texas power even more expensive.

McCullough Research

“Here we have a state with more energy than almost anywhere else in the world, and yet it has what could only be called a failing electric system,” McCullough told StateImpact Texas.

A spokesperson for the PUC said commission members could not respond to questions from StateImpact Texas until the public comment period on the price cap issue expires at the end of May. The issue has come before the Senate Committee on Business and Commerce, which oversees the PUC. But efforts to reach the chairman of the committee, Sen. John Carona, a Republican from Dallas, were not successful.

Dave Fehling/StateImpact Texas

State Rep. Sylvester Turner warns that consumers will be paying more for power

One Texas lawmaker who has written the PUC with his concerns over the effect raising the price cap is Sen. Sylvester Turner, a Democrat from Houston.

“If we’re talking about the summer and everybody’s turning on the switch pretty much at the same time, and the price of energy spikes, every one of us will be paying considerably more,” Rep.Turner told StateImpact Texas.

• Listen to PUC Discussion About Power and ProfitsPUC meeting held April 12 2012 Download

Next time you buy a Texas tomato, check where it was grown. The answer might surprise you. That’s because ninety percent of the state’s tomatoes come from a few greenhouses in the arid deserts of Far West Texas. (You can see a detailed breakdown of how the process works in the slideshow above.)

The latest addition to that group is a massive glass facility in Monahans, outside of Odessa. It officially opened for business this week.

• Desert Tomatoes, Without Any RainNew greenhouse uses 87 percent less water than typical farmingDownload

“Well, when you look at this, this is like a giant, 15-acre, indoor garden,” says Doug Kling, Senior Vice President for Village Farms, which owns and operates the greenhouse. “Pollinated [by] bees, and grown naturally. Where the sunlight comes in and you can smell the calyx. It’s kind of exciting. There’s a peacefulness to it.” 

So how exactly do you grow tomatoes in the desert?

Photo by Filipa Rodrigues/StateImpact Texas

Doug Kling says “there’s a peacefulness” to the greenhouse.

“The way this works is, we don’t grow in the soil. We grow in a steril environment, like coco peat,” says Kling. “There’s no hard minerals in that, like arsenic. So what we do is, we control the environment by controlling the airflow in the greenhouse, closing the vents off, misting from the top to makes sure it’s humid enough so the plants don’t dry out.”

The plants are “infused” in water in the coco peat, and any runoff is captured in a gutter underneath. “We recycle that up to five times,” Kling says, “which allows us to use 87 percent less water than in the field.” That water is then sent to the city golf course. “And because of the ultimate climate conditions,” Kling adds, “we get thirty times the yield of a [traditional] field per acre.”

Bees are allowed in to pollinate, but other bugs are kept out, eliminating the need for pesticides.

Photo by Filipa Rodrigues/StateImpact Texas

Commissioner of Agriculture Todd Staples inspects the tomatoes.

Texas Commissioner of Agriculture Todd Staples was on hand for the ribbon-cutting. He invited a group of reporters, including StateImpact Texas, to fly out with him.

“We have a facility here that uses one-fifth of the water of traditionally field grown crops and has forty times the yield,” Staples says. “It’s a phenomenal system that’s been put together and really an example of the future.”

Village Farms says the project will bring 400 full-time jobs to the area. The company plans to expand the facility to over 120 acres of greenhouse farming in the coming years.

You’re going to need something better than wayfarers this weekend. The first annular solar eclipse of the 21^st century for the continental U.S. is coming to Texas Sunday. You can see photos of some notable eclipses in the slideshow above.

The eclipse will start in Eastern Asia and cross east over the Pacific, ending in Central Texas. Here’s an interactive map of where the eclipse will pass, with peak viewing times. NASA says the eclipse will begin at 7:35 pm in Texas and peak at sundown. The best views will be from West Texas, particularly Amarillo, Lubbock and Midland-Odessa, where the eclipse will peak right around 8:30 pm. For those of you in the big cities of Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and San Antonio, you won’t get to see the full peak phase of the eclipse because the sun will have set by then. But you’ll still be able to see some of it.

An annular eclipse is close to a total eclipse, but not quite. With an annular solar eclipse, the moon directly passes between the earth and the sun, casting a shadow on the earth’s surface.  For a viewer on earth, the light from the sun is almost fully blocked creating a “ring of fire” around the moon.

NASA cautions viewers to not look directly at the sun and to not rely on standard sunglasses. Looking directly at the eclipse can cause permanent eye damage. “The ring of sunlight during annularity is blindingly bright,” Fred Ezpenack, an eclipse expert at NASA, warns on their website. 

“Even though most of the Sun’s disk will be covered, you still need to use a solar filter or some type of projection technique. A No. 14 welder’s glass is a good choice. There are also many commercially available solar filters.”

The last annular solar eclipse in the United States was way back on May 10, 1994. The next total solar eclipse in Texas will be visible on April 8, 2024.

Jillian Schantz is an intern with KUT News. 

Photo By Getty Images

The Pennzenergy Company Oil Exploration Drilling Rig In The Gulf Of Mexico.

If you were hoping to get in on some of the action in offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, time is running out. On Thursday the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) gave final notice of an upcoming sale of nearly 38 million acres of offshore leases.

Those leases run an area from three to 230 miles off the coast, the BOEM says, and range anywhere from nine feet to more than two miles deep. The bureau estimates that there’s somewhere around 31 billion barrels of oil and 134 trillion cubic feet of natural gas waiting there that are “currently undiscovered and technically recoverable.” (But they say the actual production would likely be much less, resulting in 1 billion barrels of oil and 4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.)

The sale takes place June 20th at the Mercedez-Benz Superdome. But bids must be submitted by mail no later than June 19th. The Department says that the minimum bid for deepwater leases is $100 per acre.

The sale had been put on hold following the 2010 BP Oil spill disaster at the Deepwater Horizon rig. So what’s being done to prevent that from happening again? In a statement earlier this year, the Department of Interior laid out some of the requirements for drillers wanting a piece of the Gulf:

“These include stipulations to protect biologically sensitive resources, mitigate potential adverse effects on protected species, and avoid potential conflicts associated with oil and gas development in the region. BOEM completed a supplemental environmental impact statement relating to this sale, which considers the latest available information for the Central Gulf of Mexico Planning Area following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.”

As we reported in January, public opposition to the sales has been muted. At one public hearing in Houston, only six people showed up.

Once the sale is complete, it will mark the end of the government’s 2007 – 2012 Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Natural Gas Leasing Program. Another five-year program is in the works for 2012–2017, which the Department of Interior says will make 75 percent of the “undiscovered technically recoverable oil and gas” thought to be in the Outer Continental Shelf of the Gulf open to drilling.

Photo courtesy of NASA via Flickr’s Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/5246675993/lightbox/#/photos/gsfc/5246675993/

This NASA photo shows an algae bloom near New Zealand’s Chatham Islands. The bloom is an example of a carbon sink, an area that absorbs more carbon than it produces.

Carbon emission is one of the scientific issues of our time. While an overwhelming majority of scientists see a link between man-made emissions and global climate change, the rate at which emissions are entering the atmosphere and their precise impact continues to be hotly debated.

The findings of a new study written up in Science News Magazine puts an interesting twist on that debate.

The report shows that, contrary to the previous research, the earth’s ability to soak up carbon has “increased roughly in line with rising emissions.”

The process by which the earth soaks up atmospheric carbon takes place in areas known as “carbon sinks.” Carbon sinks are typically large ecosystems like forests whose dense plant life take in large amounts of carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. Another is the ocean, whose waters can absorb carbon dioxide. As global emissions rise, so does concern that carbon sinks have reached capacity and will not be able to soak up increasing carbon emissions.

Authors of the new report are not sure why the earth might be absorbing more carbon. They speculate that it could be that “forests are regrowing in parts of the world more than scientists had thought” or that “the oceans may be taking up significantly more carbon than researchers had estimated.”

But before you decide it’s OK to burn all that extra fossil fuel you have kicking around the back yard, take note: the authors of the study say increased emissions are still damaging the planet even if that carbon is being re-absorbed.

Photo by Brent Stirton/Getty Images

FSC sustainable logging being carried out in the natural forest of Cameroon.

Woe is the eco-conscious consumer. Just when they think they’re buying green, something screws it all up. The latest group allegedly mucking things up is the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), which is losing corporate sponsors amid allegations of “green-washing.”

First, some background. SFI officially started as a division of the the industry group American Forest and Paper Association (AF&PA). Although it officially broke away and turned non-profit in 2001, the now-separate organizations remain closely associated. SFI continues to be funded by AF&PA in the form of tax-deductible donations, according to a new report by the watchdog group (and, in a sense, competitors of SFI) ForestEthics. They allege that those timber industry funds given to SFI “support advertising and brand enhancement for the AF&PA-represented paper and timber industry.”

ForestEthics says that “out of 543 audits of SFI-certified companies since 2004, not one acknowledges any major issues—such as soil erosion, clearcutting, water quality, or chemical usage—that are known to be problems with large-scale timber operations.”

While ForestEthics is the leader of this movement, it isn’t alone. Between March and September of last year, several major companies — including Aetna,  Allstate, AT&T, Office Depot, State Farm, and Sprint — publicly announced their intention to remove the SFI label from their products and/or to avoid the use of SFI-labeled products in the future. Just last week, according to ForestEthics, several more big brands — including Philips Van Heusen, Shutterfly, and U.S. Airways — decided to let go of SFI as well.

President and CEO of SFI, Kathy Abusow, was quick to rebut the allegations put forth by ForestEthics and said that “ForestEthics’ malicious campaigns and bullying tactics will not deter us from [our] focus of responsible forestry and conservation collaboration.”

“Behind the green paint on SFI’s brand is business-as-usual forest destruction,” says Aaron Sanger of ForestEthics. “Today’s leading companies want environmentally responsible partners, not the seal of a timber industry-supported organization that leading environmental groups believe is irresponsible.”

Many of the companies trending away from SFI have instead chosen to become certified by Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the regulatory foresting agency that ForestEthics supports. And caught in the middle are consumers, who still aren’t sure of a “green” label’s worth.

Photo courtesy of Lunchbox Photography via Flikr’s Creative Commons. http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcorduroy/6817020034/

Even Thor’s lightening, thunder and rain didn’t free Central Texas fully from drought.

The word Thursday derives from the Old Norse thorsdagr, meaning “Thor’s Day.”

But here at StateImpact Texas, Thursday means something else entirely.  It’s the day the U.S. drought monitor releases it’s weekly drought map!

Thor was the Norse god of thunder, and parts of Texas saw plenty of storms (and rain) last week, raising hopes that the central part of the state would finally be able to proclaim itself drought free. Unfortunately, those hopes were dashed by the new map which shows the western edges of the Hill Country are still in moderate or severe drought.

But the map still holds good news for much of the state. The drought conditions continue to weaken, with the eastern part of Texas either seeing a normal amount of precipitation or listed only as “abnormally dry.” Even the Trans-Pecos region of far West Texas saw some improvement, moving from “exceptional” drought to “extreme” drought.

Exceptional drought still exists, however, in parts of the Texas Panhandle.

While the positive trend continues, reservoir levels remain low across the state even in areas that have seen rain. San Antonio expects water levels in the Edwards Aquifer, its chief source of water, could continue to drop despite the rains. The LCRA listed the Highland Lake System, an important water source for Austin and communities downriver, as only 51 percent full today.

“In order to fill Lake Travis, it’s going to take a really significant storm system, or series of storms,” Bob Rose, meteorologist for the LCRA told StateImpact Texas last week.

The situation out West is even more dire. Residents are hoping a summer monsoon season may bring relief in that part of the state.

Ironically, the rains have brought their own troubles to Texas. Flash flood warnings were declared in many counties earlier this week. Residents of Bastrop, Texas, where wildfires burned around 34,000 acres last year, now fear heavy rains may bring serious erosion to their county,

Map courtesy of the US Drought Monitor.

This image has been cropped for the purposes of this story.