The Canary in the Turbine: Water Resilience for Economic Resilience

In both East Africa and the southwestern US, two storylines have converged to provide the same message: the intersection between climate impacts, water, and energy grids will have profound economic, social, and ecological consequences. 

In one storyline, the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi is now generating hydropower at about 4 percent of capacity. The much older Hoover Dam on the Colorado is probably either six or eighteen months away from having water levels fall below turbine intake tunnels. In their day, each dam was held up as a state-of-the-art investment, designed to literally fuel economic transformations. Instead, accelerating climate impacts, weak governance, and inflexible infrastructure designs have made each dam — both among the world’s largest — a symbol of the “resilience gap” in our critical economic systems.

I am not blaming engineers, planners, or hydrologists for this situation; climate resilience is ultimately not an engineering issue. It is a choice to invest in robust, flexible options for the future, and decision makers for both dams did not invest in exploring the long-term credibility of their assumptions.

At this writing, US decision makers are negotiating dire changes in water governance, distribution, and management for the extended Colorado River basin, which includes some 40 million US citizens. It is not clear to me that decisions are also being made to respect Mexico’s water rights. I am also concerned about how well ecosystems and poor and indigenous groups are represented in these negotiations. Yet the choices are limited and no easy answers exist.

Unfortunately, both trends have been clear for some time, and decision makers have had ample opportunities to prepare and respond. In practice, little preparation has occurred. Expensive interventions bought only a little extra time for these systems. In 2013, I myself prognosticated that the Hoover Dam would cease power generation in the 2030s. I felt like a radical at the time, yet even I was about a decade too conservative! These impacts are moving very quickly at this stage. And efforts by groups such as the International Hydropower Association have, so far, done little to assuage my concerns that these two dams are only the beginning of a global wave of climate-driven hydropower stresses (or that new dams are being designed in significantly different ways). At best, most new dams have some nominal de-risking. But the real risk is probably for the great mass of decades-old hydropower facilities. Countries that are super-dependent on hydropower (e.g., Japan, Turkey, China, Norway, Peru, Zambia) are especially exposed to major disruptions. 

Of course, hydropower is not the only energy system at risk of climate mismatches. About a year ago, extreme cold prevented reservoirs in Texas from supplying coal-powered turbines, while extreme high temperatures threatened French nuclear facility cooling waters. With few exceptions, the links between resilience, water, and energy are profound and mostly unaccounted for.

That said, I am confident that we can design resilient hydropower and other water-intensive energy systems. And several groups have made real strides to mainstreaming these approaches. But for the most part these methodologies remain little used, especially for existing (and often aged) facilities. Resilience is a new design and operational quality, still mostly undervalued.