Santa Teresa Water Treatment Plant
Sedimentation Basin in Almaden Valley
Photo
Note: That green tint in the water is actually the algae that grows due to the
high-nutrient discharge of farm runoff into the Delta and then concentrated in
San Luis Reservoir. When the depth gets low enough, as it is now, the light
penetration causes the reservoir to bloom. In order to avoid objectionable
taste and odors in our drinking water, we must remove the algae at our local
treatment plants, using expensive carbon filters. Think a 100 million gallon
per day Brita filter.
Our first taste of imported water in
Santa Clara County was almost free to the Santa Clara Valley Water District.
Since investor-owned water companies, like San Jose Water Company, were blocked
by federal legislation from purchasing water from San Francisco's Hetch Hetchy
Aqueduct, cities along the South Bay's shore formed municipal water
departments and contracted directly with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commision to buy water. Today, those
contracts supply 15% of the county's water, although the cost of that supply
will rise 400% to pay for the $4 Billion in bonds sold by SF to rebuild most of
the 90-year-old system.
This situation would present a problem
for the Santa Clara Valley Water District if those municipal water departments
began pumping cheaper groundwater into their service areas to avoid paying the
higher costs for Hetch Hetchy supply. However, the price gap will be
short-lived as the price for the Water District's supply will be increasing at
a similar rate over the next decade or two, and billions of dollars are
expended both inside and outside the county to continue to obtain another 40%
of our water supply from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
While Proposition 1 was passed last November by the State's voters, allowing sale of $7.5 billion of bonds to pay for
adding more storage and building local options for water to address future
water needs, other infrastructure projects in the Delta were not included in
the recent bond measure. These facilities will be part of a fifty-year permit
issued as part of a Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) for Delta ecosystem
restoration and water supply reliability. The Bay Delta Conservation Plan
(BDCP) recently released a 30,000-page environmental impact document detailing
the baseline as it exists today and plans for fixing this broken ecosystem and
mitigating the interwoven stressors, which have caused a half dozen native fish
species to be listed on the Endangered Species Act. Biological opinions filed
by State and Federal Fish and Wildlife agencies caused the pumping by the State
and Federal water projects in the southern Delta to be severely curtailed.
The present value estimates for the
BDCP program, including new conveyance facilities is $15.4 billion plus $2.3
billion in operating and maintenance costs over 50 years. Santa Clara County
will be responsible for about 4% of those costs as their proportional share of
the contract entitlements for the water pumped by the State Water Project and
the Federal Central Valley Project, as Santa Clara Valley Water District is the
only water agency in the state to have contracts with both systems. The Water
District estimates that we will spend $228 million locally over the next
10 years to increase reliability of our Delta water supplies.
Santa Clara Valley Water District contracts for water deliveries through both major water diversion projects exporting water from the southern Delta, near Tracy. The South Bay Aqueduct pumps water over the Diablo Range, through Livermore and Pleasanton and terminates near Alum Rock Park in San Jose.
The other aqueduct is called the San Felipe Aqueduct and is a recent (1987) addition to the Federal Central Valley project. Delta water is conveyed to the jointly-owned State-Federal San Luis Reservoir through both the California Aqueduct and the Delta-Mendota Canal and pumped into the 2 million ac-ft off-stream storage facility.
Once Delta water arrives in Santa
Clara County, it requires treatment in state-of-the-art treatment plants to
remove a broad array of chemical contaminants to bring the quality up to State
and Federal drinking water standards. The Santa Clara Valley Water District
owns three such plants: a 40-million-gallons per day (MGD) plant named
Penetencia in the east foothills near Alum Rock Park, an 80-MGD plant named
Rinconada, adjacent to the Los Gatos Golf Club of the same name, and the newest
Santa Teresa Water Treatment Plant in Almaden Valley capable of treating 100
MGD.
The combined costs of importing and
treating Delta water, delivered by two aqueducts, is currently over $100
million per year. Capital improvement projects planned by the SCVWD will add
considerably to this annual cost.
Source: SCVWD 2012 Water Supply and
Infrastructure Master Plan
The expansion of the Rinconada Water
Treatment plant to 100 MGD
is currently under environmental
review and is expected to cost around $200 million.
Existing Rinconada Water Treatment Facility
Recently the twelve 2000 hp
pumps at the Pacheco Pumping Plant on the west end of San Luis Reservoir had to
be replaced after 25 years of service at a cost of $13 million.
The Water
District's surplus Delta water stored in Kern County's groundwater basin will
be recovered at an additional cost of $12 million to reverse the flow of the
California Aqueduct for about 100 miles, more than tripling the cost of remote water banking from
$165/acre-ft. to $565/ac.-ft. That's in addition to the $40 million per year contract costs of the two aqueducts that were suppose to deliver water directly to SCVWD.
Depending on the amount of water delivered annually, the unit costs for using these two conveyance systems ranges from $160 for 250,000 ac-ft to $1,000 if and when only 40,000 ac-ft were available. In 2014, 70,000 ac-ft of Delta water plus 35,000 ac-ft of recovered Semitropic Bank water withdrawal were conveyed through the two aqueducts, for a unit cost of $380 per ac-ft.
As the cost of the Water District’s
imported water continues to rise, local reliability projects like water use
efficiency and water recycling become the obviously preferable alternative.
However, due to what I call "asset inertia" projects intended to increase the reliability of Delta water continue to be funded by the Board of Directors, who seem oblivious to the response to both State and other local agencies who realize it's time to rely less, not more, on Delta water deliveries. After sixty years of a growing reliance on water from remote watersheds, a sensible
revision of our local water policy would be to shift immediately to increasing
locally controlled supplies.
3 comments:
Thanks Pat, I've been working on the cost impact on water from SJWC, for ratepayers. Traced it from Semitropic to the O'Neil Bay at the San Luis Reservoir and given that a water swap was unlikely was trying to find the costs to the San Luis to SCVWD south county pipe. I found your graphics doing Google image searches previously, but it's great to see similar results to what I'm finding.
My blog is http://sjwc-rate-increase.blogspot.com/
Thanks for your comment James.
Your blog is certainly a public service and provides the transparency that all CPUC tariff reviews should receive.
Keep up the good work and
Never Thirst!
Pat Ferraro
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