http://www.rgj.com/article/20100207/NEWS07/100207004/1003/CARSON/Nevada-official-worries-about-water-ruling-effect

February 7, 2010

Nevada official worries about water ruling effect

By HENRY BREAN
Las Vegas Review-Journal

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Depending how it is interpreted, a recent Nevada Supreme Court ruling in a key water case could lead to “chaos” for thousands of water rights awarded over a 55-year span, the state’s chief water regulator said.

If the Jan. 28 ruling means nullifying every application for water that took more than a year to for a state decision, Acting State Engineer Jason King warned that as many as 14,500 water rights issued between 1947 and 2002 could be affected.

“I can’t even fathom it,” King said. “There would just be so much litigation. It would be gridlock.”

The decision brought a flood of paperwork to the state engineer’s office in Carson City in the first week after the ruling. Officials said 200 new water rights applications came in from water managers seeking to guard against potential fallout from the court’s action.

That was about 50 more applications than the state engineer typically sees in a month.

The new filings essentially duplicate earlier applications called into question by the ruling because they were not acted on by the state within one year, as the law requires.

Most of the new filings came from the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which could be forced by the ruling to start over again as it seeks state permission to pump enough groundwater out of eastern Nevada to supply more than 250,000 Las Vegas area homes.

The authority refiled 86 of its pending applications on the day of the Supreme Court ruling and later added another 35.

In reversing a state court decision, the justices said Nevada law required the state engineer to have acted within one year on a massive 1989 filing that sought water rights for the Las Vegas area from across rural Clark, Lincoln and White Pine counties.

Instead, the applications weren’t considered until more than a decade later, after many people who initially protested had died or moved away.

A law passed by the 2003 Legislature lets the state engineer extend the hearing process for municipal use applications. But the court said that law only applied to filings submitted after July 1, 2002.

Ultimately, the justices left it to a judge in a rural District Court to decide whether the water authority should be required to repeat the state review process for its applications from 1989.

The flood of new filings is a direct result of that uncertainty, water authority spokesman J.C. Davis said.

John Entsminger, deputy counsel for the authority, called it “prudent” for the agency to refile the applications. Some are for water rights that were granted and put to use years ago.

“I want to be clear: There’s nothing in the (Supreme Court’s) order that specifically says permits are implicated, but there’s also nothing that says they aren’t,” Entsminger said.

Late last week, Lincoln County and the private water marketing firm Vidler Water Co. filed 10 new applications in four basins they have teamed up to develop.

On Monday, the Virgin Valley Water District, which serves the Mesquite area, filed 51 applications and Washoe County filed 18.

The state engineer’s office charges $300 per application, so the recent activity will mean $50,000 in revenue for the state’s general fund and $10,000 in revenue for Nevada newspapers that will publish public notices of the filings.

Those notices will trigger a 30-day protest period. Only those who file protests and pay a $25 fee will be allowed to directly participate in any state hearings on the new filings.

King said the application fee and protest fee are set by state law, and are not refundable in the event the lower court decides the new round of filings was not necessary.

The state engineer and the water authority have about two more weeks to file a motion to have the state Supreme Court reconsider last week’s ruling.

King considers such a motion likely, if only to try to get the justices to clarify their decision.

“It just could have huge ramifications,” he said.

http://www.greenprophet.com/2010/02/06/17021/solar-energy-desert/

Solar Energy Developers Find Themselves in Green Versus Green Debate Over Coyote Land

Submitted by Maurice Picow on February 6, 2010 – 6:20 pm

Coyote land or parking space for solar energy?

Ask the coyotes first solar energy companies are finding out.

Solar energy project promoters may not be paying attention to the ecological impacts of installing large solar panel installations in non-settled desert areas. This issue was brought up recently following the revealing of plans for companies like the American-Israeli BrightSource Energy, who we reported as being chosen by California’s giant utility company, Pacific Gas & Electric to build solar energy installations in certain remote California desert areas.

It is now apparent that these locations, such as the vast Mojave Desert are not as “remote” as people might think, and actually possess an ecological uniqueness and beauty all their own – enough to make conservation, ecological and other green organizations ready to fight the vary renewable energy systems that are being brought there to produce clean energy to retard global warming.

These problems were covered already on Green Prophet (Solar Projects Expanding on Coyote Land), and now on Yale University’s environmental news site, Environment 360. The magazine charges that solar energy companies like BrightSource are planning to build “dozens of multi-billion dollar solar power plants in the Mojave Desert to provide electric power for millions of homes.”

The downside of this idea, however is how these plants, which require large tracts of land for solar panel arrays, will affect the delicate desert eco-balance which supports despite being arid is home for a wide variety of desert plants and animals.

BrightSource, which recently staged a demonstration of its solar energy technology at a test plant facility in Israel’s Negev Dessert has already been frustrated in building solar energy plants in desert areas of California regions of neighboring Nevada.

BrightSource’s CEO John Wooland attested to the difficulty in finding suitable desert land for solar power plants, noting that the Ivanpah Valley, as noted in a previous Green Prophet article, as the only site that his company would be  able to build on inside of California.

Environmental groups like the Sierra Club, whose ecological projects include preventing oil well drilling in Alaska’s North Slope (advocated by US Senator and former Republican Party Presidential Candidate John McCain), the battle lines concerning the Mojave are being drawn in a “green vs green” confrontation. As noted by David Meyers, director of Wildlands Conservancy, a group trying to create a desert site to be known as the  Mojave Trails National Monument:

Al Gore called these lands some of the most scenic and pristine desert areas of the world. You couldn’t put a project in a worse area from a landscape connectivity point of view… It’s a philosophic non-sequitur that you can destroy hundreds of thousands of acres to save the Earth from global warming.”

Meyer’s message is apparently being heard as he has convinced U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D.Calf) to be on his side. But some political powerbrokers in both Washington and California have other ideas, however, including California Governor Arthur Schwarzenegger (The Governator):

“If we cannot put solar power plants in the Mojave Desert, I don’t know where the hell we can put it.”

http://www.grist.org/article/2010-02-04-a-chat-with-bernie-sanders-on-his-new-10-million-solar-roofs-bil/

A chat with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his new 10 million solar roofs bill

5 FEB 2010 12:53 AM
BY DAVID ROBERTS

On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced a bill aimed at getting 10 million new solar rooftop systems and 200,000 new solar hot water heating systems installed in the U.S. in the next 10 years.

Cleverly titled the “10 Million Solar Roofs & 10 Million Gallons of Solar Hot Water Act” (PDF), it would provide rebates that cover up to half the cost of new systems, along the lines of incentive programs in California and New Jersey (not coincidentally, Nos. 1 and 2 in installed solar in the U.S.). It also includes measures to insure that those who receive assistance get information on how to make their buildings more energy efficient.

Sanders currently has nine co-sponsors: Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.),  Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and Arlen Specter (D-Pa.).

The bill would accelerate what is already a fairly rapid pace of growth for distributed solar power. Distributed energy has a number of advantages over its central-plant competitors (both clean and dirty): it’s faster to build, avoids the need for expensive transmission lines, can use already developed land, and enhances community resilience and self-reliance. It’s also labor-intensive, creating more jobs per dollar of investment than its competitors—a feature that may make it more attractive during a recession, when Democrats are turning their attention to unemployment.

I chatted with Sen. Sanders about the bill, the growth of solar, and his colleagues’ peculiar fixation on nuclear power:

Q. How much would your program cost?

A. We think this will cost between 2 and 3 billion dollars a year, and at the end of a 10-year period we are going to be producing 30,000 new megawatts of energy—the equivalent of what 30 nuclear power plants produce. This is a very cost effective way of producing that energy.

Q. Even if you take half the price off a solar system, it still has relatively high upfront capital costs. Are you looking into ways for people to find financing?

A. Remember that there are already a lot of tax credits, federal and in many states.  The federal tax credit would be up to 30 percent off the cost of a project. That’s a lot.  Let’s say hypothetically you wanted to spend $40,000 on solar. If you take 30 percent off that, you’re down to $28,000. If you get state help you’re down to $25,000. Then the federal government would pay half of that.

That’s a pretty good deal! It could be a major incentive for people to use photovoltaics. And the more photovoltaics we use, the more will be built; the more that are built, the cheaper it becomes.

Q. What about the objection that it’s a subsidy that advantages some states (the sunny ones) over others?

A. The fact is that every state in this country can produce at least 10 percent of its electricity from solar. [Sanders’ press release cites ISLR’s report on Energy Self-Reliant States.] In Vermont, we’re moving on solar. New Jersey is one of the leading producers of solar energy in America.  It’ll obviously work better in Florida and California—that’s true, and that’s great—but this is for all 50 states.

For people who are complaining about subsidies to energy, well, they’ve got to take a deep breath: huge amounts of money into nuclear, huge amounts of money into coal, huge amounts of money into oil.  It is time that we begin to subsidize those technologies that are cutting greenhouse gas emissions and in the long run will be more cost-effective.

Q. Do you get the sense that your Senate colleagues appreciate the power of renewable energy, particularly distributed renewables?

A. No, they don’t. I’m a member of both the Environment Committee and the Energy Committee, and it just astounds me how little discussion there has been about the potential of sustainable energy in general and solar in particular.  If you go to an Energy Committee meeting, it’s about nuclear, nuclear, nuclear. The general assumption is that nuclear is time-tested, it’s cheap, it’s reliable; solar is experimental, it’s fringe, maybe someday.

Roughly speaking, a new nuclear power plant will cost you about $10 billion. Then at some point you’ve got to decommission it and get rid of the waste—a great expense. The average nuclear power plant will produce about 1,000 megawatts for that $10 billion dollars. We can produce 30,000 megawatts for $30 billion and they’re going to produce it for $300 billion.

Now, theirs is baseload ours is intermittent, that is true. But having said that, our form of production is far more cost effective than nuclear. Have you ever heard anybody talk about that outside of the environmental community? You have not heard that discussion on the floor of the House or the Senate. And the reason you’re not hearing about this is the solar industry doesn’t quite have the clout that the coal industry, the oil industry, or the nuclear industry has.

Now, you asked me [about distributed energy].  We need to push solar, in all of its forms, as aggressively as we can.  I’m not very sympathetic to people who tell us, “If we don’t move aggressively to cut greenhouse gas emissions the world will collapse, but I don’t like wind because a bird got killed.” According to the secretary of the interior, we can produce almost 30 percent of the electricity for homes in this country through solar thermal in the Southwest.  That is extraordinary. We should begin building those things tomorrow.

It’s not a question of either/or. It’s both. It’s those, wind, geothermal, biomass versus coal and oil and nuclear. Our main job is to cut back greenhouse gas emissions in a fundamental way, and to transform our energy system. So people should be putting their shoulders to the wheel.

Q. Is anyone in Congress talking about the barriers to distributed energy posed by America’s complex regime of utility regulations?

A. Yeah, they are. Many of us like what Germany has done—feed-in tariffs. In Vermont, without state regulations, one of our major utilities has unilaterally instituted those with good results. A lot of the utilities are tied into coal and to gas, and they will be resistant. There’s always resistance to change. But I think we have the wind at our backs, or the sun in our faces, or whatever. We are making progress.

Q. What’s the road forward for the bill? Any chance it will be part of the upcoming jobs bill?

A. It’s certainly something I would like to see. In any vehicle, any venue we can get, we’re going to push it.

http://www.lincolncountyrecord.com/pages/100204_solar

Vidler Water Company plans huge solar energy project north of Reno

By Dave Morgan
Reprinted with permission courtesy of News Carson City

Vidler Water Company, based in Carson City, is proposing to build a huge solar energy project at its Fish Springs Ranch 40 miles north of Reno. If Washoe County planners and the County Commission approve  it, it would be the largest “solar farm” in the country, producing enough energy to power over 20,000 homes.  Vidler said it would build the solar farm in stages, the first one productiong 20 megawatts of power, enough to power 4,000 homes. Construction of phase one would begin in 2011 with additional phases running out 15 years.

Vidler bought the Fish Springs Ranch in 2000 hoping to send its large underground water supply to meet the “then fast growing” housing market north of Reno. However, the recession and other factors have all but stopped it. Vidler President Dorothy Timian-Palmer says they are hoping the income from power sales from the solar farm will help them gain-back their investment in the ranch.  Vidler expects to sell much of its power to NV Energy which is required by law to obtain 20% of its total power from renewable resources by 2015, and 25% by 2025.

There is also an interest in using Vidler’s project to spark development of a solar panel manufacturing plant in the Stead area.  A Vidler official said Stead has a lot of room for manufacturing and Vidler has alot of water to sell coming down that long-neglected pipeline from Fish Springs.

http://www.lincolncountyrecord.com/pages/100204_snwa

02-04-2010 SNWA Lake Mead Project Update

SNWA Lake Mead Project Updated

By Dave Maxwell

Development of an innovative project to take water from the bottom of Lake Mead, was the topic of presentation at the Lincoln County Water District meeting in Pioche January 21. Bruno Bowles of Southern Nevada Water’s Ely office gave the Power Point presentation.
Briefly stated, what Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) is doing is constructing an underground water tunnel, Intake #3, underneath Lake Mead. Bowles said a 600-foot deep vertical shaft will be drilled into the mountain; the tunnel-boring machine will be lowered into the shaft and then dig a tunnel, 23-feet in diameter, under the lakebed that existed before Hoover Dam was built in the early 1930s.

“Right now,” Bowles said, “Lake Mead is really the driving factor for a lot of the work that is going on. Level of the lake is fluctuating right now between 1096 and 1097, day by day. Generally, the recharge is a little more in the fall.” Bureau of Reclamation figures show that in January of 2000, the lake level was about 1220 feet, but has dropped steadily ever since. However, Bowles said, forecasts call for the lake to receive a little more water in about a year.

Problems loom in the future for pumping water from out of Lake Mead in the fact that should the level drop below 1050, Intake Pump #1 will be above the water level. Intake Pump #2 will be nearly exposed if the lake level drops to 1000 feet, making it  very difficult to draw any water out.

He said, “Right now we’re kind of in a race against time. If we do get some relief and get some extra snow and releases into Lake Mead, our water situation will look pretty good. But some of the predictions as early as 2012 or 2013 are saying that the lake could hit 1050, and at that time we will loose intake #1 and Intake #3 may not be completed before that happens.”

Because the Intake #3 tunnel goes underneath the lake for three miles, and then comes up, Bowles said the project is going to be “one of the biggest, sketchy, and dangerous tunneling projects that’s been done in the United States. There are very, very large pressures under there.”

SNWA approved the idea for the $817 million project in 2005, and completion is scheduled for 2013.  When completed it would allow a water draw at a level of 860 feet.

One of the advantages to drawing water from the lake bottom, Bowles said, is that “the quality is likely to be better, since the water is colder.”

On other subjects, such as water conservation, Bowles said SNWA has changed the conversation goal to 110 gallons per person per day by 2035 in residential areas in Las Vegas, and 199 gallons per day by 2035 involving all the various uses for water.  He said ground water from the Las Vegas valley and from the Colorado River is being used at full consumption right now.

In addition, he said, SNWA has been paying an Arizona company to store Lake Mead water underground, along the All American canal on the Arizona-California border, “so we can have that in the future.”

He said the water pipeline from White Pine and Lincoln Counties, expected to be in use by 2020, will help to increase water available for the valley, and by 2040, it is expected the water from the Snake Valley area (bordering Utah) will come on-line.

Bowles talked briefly about cloud seeding experiments that Desert Research Institute has been conducting since about 1985 in the Ruby Mountains and Tuscarora/Owyhee region, that have proved to been quite successful. The goal has been to create more snow in the mountains.

Based on an average, covering 10 years, 23,000 – 24,000 acre feet of additional water have been produced, “and some of the water does flow down into Lincoln County,” he said.

Commissioner Tommy Rowe suggested such cloud seeding generators should be placed more in the mountains of the Colorado basin and the Wasatch Front, to get the snow there for spring run off to increase the flow to the Colorado River and Lake Mead. Lincoln County Water District General Manager Wade Poulsen noted the Snake Valley, among others, has been suggested as another area for more cloud seeding generators.  He said Lincoln County is not a good site for the generators, “because most of the mountain tops are wilderness areas, and they are not allowed there.”

Taking salt out of seawater has always been a very expensive process, but SNWA has been working on such a project for a number of years, Bowles said. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the Central Arizona Water Conservation District, and SNWA, will share the funding of a $13.6 million pilot project at the Yucca Desalting Plant near Yuma, Arizona.  The Bureau of Reclamation (Bureau) will fund a little over $9 million of the project, which is expected to be able to generate about 29,000 acre-feet of water annually. The three entities will also share the water produced, and put back into the Colorado River System, based on contributions. SNWA will receive about 3,100 acre-feet.

Bowles said the plant in Yuma was built about 1995, but never used. He said the plant will be reopened for some testing during 2010. Admittedly, he said, “They are not really sure there will be enough water produced to make it feasible.”

http://hamptonroads.com/2010/02/surry-board-oks-coal-power-plant

Surry board OKs coal power plant

Posted to: Environment News Western Tidewater

By Linda McNatt
The Virginian-Pilot
© February 5, 2010
SURRY

The debate over a coal-fired energy plant in the center of Surry County continued Thursday with a standing-room-only crowd at the Board of Supervisors meeting.

The Dendron Town Council on Monday approved rezonings and a conditional use permit for the Cypress Creek Power Station, paving the way for the state’s largest coal-fired energy plant to be located in the tiny town.

Old Dominion Electric Cooperative wants to build the $4 billion plant – the price has come down since it was first proposed – on about 1,600 acres.

On Thursday, the Surry County Board of Supervisors followed Dendron’s example and approved the necessary changes to the county’s comprehensive plan, zoning changes and a conditional use permit to allow for the plant.

Two parcels would be in Surry County – the landfill, where the coal ash would be stored, and the water intake system from the James River. The river water would cool the 1,500-megawatt plant, expected to power 375,000 homes.

ODEC hopes to open the plant in 2016.

The Surry County portion of the project represents only 18 percent of the total land use, planning director Rhonda Mack told the supervisors Thursday.

The speakers at the public hearing were almost evenly divided among those who want the plant for the jobs and tax revenue it could provide, and the opponents who fear it could harm the health of the community. The zoning changes are from agricultural/residential to industrial.

Just before the meeting, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation issued a press release opposing the facility.

In nearby Sussex County, both the planning commission and the Board of Supervisors approved zoning changes and a conditional use permit to allow ODEC to build the plant in rural Sussex.

C. Eric Fly, chairman of the Board of Supervisors, said after the meeting that only eight people spoke opposing the plant and, of that number, only one was a local resident.

http://www.grist.org/article/2010-02-04-epa-capitulates-ethanol-clean-coal

ECHOES OF BUSH

EPA capitulates on ethanol, hearts clean coal

4 FEB 2010 8:10 AM
BY TOM PHILPOTT

Expect to see a lot more of this kind of thing.
The press release could have come straight out of the utterly disgraced Bush EPA—and if it had, I can well imagine the howls of outrage it would have provoked, because I would have joined the chorus. Its headline read as follows: “Obama Announces Steps to Boost Biofuels, Clean Coal.”

In short, after a flirtation with reason last spring, the Obama EPA has signed off on the absurd, abysmal Renewable Fuel Standard established under Bush a couple of years ago—ensuring that farmers will continue to devote vast swaths of land to GHG-intensive corn, of which huge portion of will ultimately be set aflame to power cars—but not before being transformed into liquid fuel in an energy-intensive process.

As as ethanol factories continue sucking in more and more corn, plantation owners in places like Brazil and Argentina will put more grassland and even rainforest under the plow to make up for the shortfall, resulting in huge carbon emissions. That dire effect of our ethanol program, known as indirect land-use change, likely nullifies any scant climate benefits from ethanol. In downplaying indirect land use in its assessment of the Renewable Fuel Standard, the agency is essentially caving to the demands of House ag committee chair Collin Peterson—who is returning the favor with an all-out assault of the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases at all.

As for “clean” coal, the EPA announced a major push for “Carbon Capture and Storage” for coal plants. But no amount of public cash for such projects can clean up the atrocity of mountain-top removal—or stop coal plants from transforming the oceans into mercury-laden toxic pits. What would carbon capture do to solve the coal ash problem? Nothing.

I can only think of one more ersatz, flimsy way to confront the specter of global ecological crisis than promoting “clean” coal and biofuels, and it would be nuclear power. Unhappily, Obama has been hyping—and putting taxpayer cash behind—that, too.

I realize that Obama’s EPA director, Lisa Jackson, has worked hard to lift the agency from the ignominy into which it had plunged under Bush’s notorious director, Stephen Johnson. In a provocative essay in The New Republic, the veteran liberal journalist John B. Judis makes a case for Jackson. Judis writes:

In her first year at the EPA, Jackson granted California a waiver to impose tougher greenhouse-gas standards for new automobiles, which the Bush administration had denied. She declared that the EPA would set standards for greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. (This means that, if Congress fails to pass cap-and-trade legislation, the EPA could act on its own to regulate carbon emissions.) And she accepted the EPA staff’s recommendations for tougher smog standards—recommendations that had been rebuffed by the previous EPA head. Science, it seems clear, is back in command at the EPA.

That track record makes the EPA’s capitulation over ethanol all the more painful. I could understand such concessions if the President were using them as pawns in a fight to push through effective climate legislation. But climate legislation got hopelessly compromised—before collapsing unceremoniously on the Senate floor. Why is Obama giving this stuff away now?

When the Democrats gained power in 2007, progressives may have assumed that the tide had turned on environmental protection. But the fossil fuel and agribusiness industries were never going to just melt away. They have hundreds of billions of dollars in investments on the ground that can only be leveraged if their products emain paramount.  Those investments will be defended.

This is a long-term battle that will require much grassroots pressure from below before it really turns—much more than can be brought to bear in any single election.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/02/03/obama-announces-clean-coal-task-force/?fbid=kQRNsQcqMl2

A coal scraper machine works on a pile of coal in West Virginia. (Photo Credit: Getty Images/File)

Obama announces ‘clean coal’ task force

Posted: February 3rd, 2010 04:35 PM ET

Washington (CNN) – President Barack Obama announced Wednesday he is forming a task force to oversee how the United States can “deploy affordable clean coal technology on a widespread scale within 10 years.”

At a meeting with governors from both parties and senior Cabinet members, including Vice President Joe Biden, Obama said he believes that taking the global lead on developing technology to remove carbon pollutants from coal-fired energy production is vital for future economic prosperity.

Goals of the task force include having 10 commercial power plants with clean-coal technology operating as demonstration projects by 2016, Obama said.

“If we can develop the technology to capture the carbon pollution released by coal, it can create jobs and provide energy well into the future,” he told reporters.

The initiative is part of a set of moderate energy policies outlined by Obama in his State of the Union speech last week and expanded on Wednesday.

He re-emphasized his strong support for developing alternative clean energy sources to fossil fuels such as oil and coal as a way to both reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change and build U.S. economic growth. He called such a strategy smart policy in a world still dependent on fossil fuels but trying to shift to new alternatives.

The United States will continue to use coal as an energy source for years to come, the president said, while emerging economies such as China are building new coal-fired plants to meet their expanding energy needs. With the world also focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions from coal energy and other sources, developing technology to remove carbon pollution from coal plant emissions makes sense, he said.

He acknowledged that some people remain skeptical that climate change is an immediate threat, saying: “Climate change is one of the reasons why we have to pursue a clean energy agenda, but it’s not the only reason, so even if you don’ t believe in the severity of climate change as I do, you still should want to pursue this agenda.”

Other aspects of what Obama called a non-ideological energy policy included expanded use of nuclear energy, more offshore drilling for oil and natural gas, and increased emphasis on developing clean energy alternatives.

“We can’t afford to spin our wheels while the rest of the world speeds ahead,” he said.

In a briefing with reporters after Obama’s meeting with the governors, Cabinet secretaries outlined other steps announced Wednesday, including a report by a biofuel task force set up previously that outlines the plan for meeting a goal of producing 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022.

The biofuel task force plan upgrades the status of corn ethanol as a clean energy source, with the goal of attracting more investment into corn ethanol production, said Lisa P. Jackson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.
.

http://www.lvrj.com/news/state-high-court-deals-setback-to-pipeline-proposal-for-southern-nevada-83014557.html

PERMITTING PROCESS: State high court deals setback to pipeline proposal for Southern Nevada

State high court deals setback to pipeline proposal for Southern Nevada

By HENRY BREAN

LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

A spring-fed irrigation canal flows through part of a family ranch in White Pine County on Aug. 13. A Nevada Supreme Court ruling Thursday might force Las Vegas water managers to start all over again as they seek state permits to siphon groundwater from rural areas such as this.
Photo by Jason Bean/Las Vegas Review-Journal

A state Supreme Court ruling issued Thursday could seriously delay or halt a multibillion-dollar plan to supply Las Vegas with groundwater from across eastern Nevada.

In a stunning reversal of a District Court decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the groundwater applications underpinning the pipeline project might not be valid, raising the possibility that the Southern Nevada Water Authority will have to start the state permitting process all over again.

Within hours of the decision, Utah officials announced they were backing away from a water-sharing agreement with Nevada, and the authority filed a flurry of new water applications.

One longtime critic of the pipeline project, White Pine County Commissioner Gary Perea, called on the authority to “go back to the beginning and do this right” or “simply abandon the scheme and work to make Las Vegas sustainable.”

At issue are the dozens of applications filed by the Las Vegas Valley Water District with the state engineer in 1989 for unappropriated groundwater in rural areas as much as 300 miles away. The water was originally sought to supply growth in Southern Nevada, but it is now seen as a safety net for a community that gets 90 percent of its water from the drought-stricken Colorado River.

At the time of the massive filing, Nevada law required the state’s chief water regulator to act on applications within one year, but the district’s water requests would not be heard for almost two decades.

In 2003, with the district’s applications still pending, the Legislature passed a law that addressed that discrepancy by waiving the one-year rule for water sought for municipal use. In its unanimous opinion Thursday, however, the Supreme Court said the district’s filings were already far too old in 2003 to be covered by such an exemption.

But the justices stopped short of nullifying the applications altogether. Instead, they sent the matter back to the rural District Court, where a judge will decide whether the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which is now responsible for the water district’s filings, should be required to submit new applications for the groundwater it wants in rural Clark, Lincoln and White Pine counties.

The lower court also could decide to let the older applications stand but require the state engineer to hear new protests on those filings.

State law limits the protest period to 30 days after an application is filed, which means only those who lodged protests within that window 21 years ago were allowed to participate directly in hearings on the groundwater withdrawals.

Authority officials have 18 days to file a motion for reconsideration with the high court.

There is no telling how long it could take for the water authority to repeat the entire state permitting process and no guarantee that the state engineer will decide to grant the agency any water the second time around.

John Entsminger, deputy counsel for the water authority, said having to restart the process would mean “additional time and additional hearings, but I can’t quantify that at this point.”

Authority spokesman J.C. Davis said there is a real chance the project won’t be delayed because the authority board hasn’t voted to build it yet.

All that is going on right now is a federal environmental review and the state permitting process, work that water authority Deputy General Manager Kay Brothers vowed to continue.

“We’re committed to getting the (environmental impact statement) done on time,” she said.

The authority already has spent tens of millions of dollars on studies, preliminary designs and legal work for the project, which is expected to supply Las Vegas with enough water for more than 250,000 homes.

The network of pipes, pumps and reservoirs would cost between $2 billion and $3.5 billion to build, according to authority estimates now several years old.

Davis acknowledged that having to start the permitting process all over again involves uncertainty and could take some time, but he said in the end it probably won’t to change anything.

“You go through the process. You get more protests, but the science is the same,” he said. “You’re not going to get any fresh arguments.”

The Supreme Court action is the proposed pipeline’s second major setback. In October, a District Court struck down a state engineer’s ruling granting the authority water rights in three Lincoln County watersheds. That case is now on appeal before the state Supreme Court.

Thursday’s ruling came in response to a separate case from 2006 involving a group of White Pine County residents and conservationists who sued for the right to participate in the state hearings on the authority’s applications.

The lawsuit filed in Ely included 54 plaintiffs, most of them residents or property owners in White Pine County and Utah. They were joined in the lawsuit by the national environmental group Defenders of Wildlife and the Great Basin Water Network, an advocacy group formed to fight the pipeline project.

In a statement, the network’s coordinator, Rose Strickland, called the ruling a “home run for the public.”

“The Supreme Court followed Nevada water law. If we follow the law and the science, there will be no misguided pipeline threatening the environment and economies of rural Nevada and Utah,” Strickland said.

Officials from the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources were “still digesting the ruling” on Thursday and declined to comment, said Bob Conrad, spokesman for the department, which includes the state engineer’s office.

Though the ruling specifically concerns the authority’s groundwater applications in Spring Valley, it could have implications well outside that White Pine County watershed and not merely for the authority.

Entsminger said the decision could jeopardize more than 1,800 water applications that have been pending with the state for more than a year.

It also calls into question permits issued on applications that took more than a year to be reviewed and are being used to supply water to communities, farms, mines and power plants across Nevada, he said.

Because of a backlog of water applications and their complexity, the one-year rule is rarely met, he said.

Entsminger predicted the Supreme Court’s decision could trigger a “race to the state engineer’s office” by those who fear their applications could be in jeopardy.

Within hours of the ruling, the water authority refiled 40 of its applications for groundwater in Lincoln and White Pine counties, just in case. Because state law requires water applications to be considered in the order they are filed, the authority wanted to make certain it would be first in line should the courts throw out its earlier filings, explained Brothers, the authority’s deputy general manager.

By Thursday afternoon, the ruling prompted Utah Gov. Gary Herbert to stop work on a contentious water sharing agreement between Nevada and Utah.

Officials from the two states were said to be close to signing a deal to divide groundwater and protect the environment in Snake Valley, a massive watershed that straddles the border and lies at the northern end of the authority’s proposed pipeline.

Now that agreement — like the pipeline project itself — has been turned upside down.

“This ruling significantly changes the landscape upon which our ongoing discussions have been based,” Herbert said in a statement. “It allows us to revisit the proposed agreement with the state of Nevada and ensure that our continued desire to protect Utah’s water interests and the environment is met.”

01-28-2010 Water Districts Disagre

http://www.lincolncountyrecord.com/pages/100128_water

Water Districts Disagree

By Dave Maxwell

Mark Twain once wrote, “Whiskey is for drinkin,’ water is for fightin.’” Such a mindset may exist at present with the Virgin Valley Water District in Mesquite toward the Lincoln County Water District.

During the Lincoln County Water District regular meeting January 21, General Manager Wade Poulsen gave a brief report to the board that Virgin Valley Water District (VVWD) has decided not to accept the terms of a settlement proposal to the present litigation involving Lincoln County Water (LCWD), Vidler Water, and the State Water Engineer.

He said he did not know why the item was even on the agenda at the VVWD meeting, because there has not been an agreement reached as yet. “There’s no agreement to sign.”

He said VVWD did approve a motion, “that they would not settle with Lincoln County Water District and Vidler, and not sign the agreement.”

Poulsen reported he also protested when the VVWD staff began to discus details and numbers he felt should not have been revealed in a public meeting. “It was inappropriate, and not for public record yet,” he said, “since confidential negotiations were still continuing.” However, he was overruled by the VVWD legal counsel.

In 2005, Lincoln County Water District made two applications for water in Tule Valley, for the Toquop development, totaling 14,400-acre feet annually (afa). This would be split, 7,200-acre feet each, between Lincoln County and the Toquop developers.

The State Water Engineer later decided, in ruling 5181, that LCWD would be allowed 2100-afa. LCWD then sold that water to Dennis Ryder’s Poquot Power and Water.   Ryder, in turn sold half of his portion to Southern Highland Development Corporation and BLT Lincoln County Land, LLC.

Poulsen explained, the second tranche of water waited for a ruling by the state water engineer, and, Poquot Power and Water, Southern Highlands and BLT would have the opportunity to buy it, if they wanted.  However, in April 2009, Acting Water Engineer Jason King, ruled that LCWD could only have 396-acre feet per year in the second tranche.

In the meantime, Toquop developers felt such a small amount would not be worth their while to purchase, and asked to have the commitment fees they had paid to LCWD to keep their claim open returned. Lincoln County Water District and Vidler Water returned an estimated $4.4 million each to the developers.

Since that time, Poulsen said, “We felt with our science and all of the studies and all of the scientific work that we’ve done in that basin, that there was more that 396 acre feet, so we filed the appeal in the court system. And that’s what is going on now.”

A hearing judge in July 2009, Poulsen said, agreed there was enough evidence to allow a fact-finding mission to go out and look for more water. “And that’s what we’ve been doing through the deposition process, and at this time, the state engineer wants to negotiate.”

It is the appeal, though, that has upset VVWD, Poulsen said. VVWD does not want negotiation with Lincoln County Water, nor to accept the terms of a settlement agreement, choosing instead to be “an intervener on the state side because of their protest against our applications. And because they filed that, they believe they will have the opportunity to agree to our deal or negotiation with the state engineer,” he said.

Poulsen went on further to say, “What VVWD does not realize, the state water engineer can settle separately with Lincoln County, and they can accept it or reject it, that’s up to them. But, if they reject it, they’re going to have to go forward and pursue it.”