Norcal FireWeather
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California Weather with Rob Carlmark: More than sunshine
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These intakes become VERY important in the coming days.
What you are looking at are the two water intake pipes for the Hyatt Powerplant at the base of Lake Oroville.
Hydropower is really a powerful tool that California has to produce greener power...and it can be generated 24 hours a day...as long as there is water that can be released.
The upcoming issue is that the water will soon fall BELOW the bottom of these intakes.
I've read that is around 640 ft. but I am not sure of the exact number.
Right now Lake Oroville is at 646 feet and the record low is 645 set in September 1977.
So very quickly we are going to have a record low...then a possible disruption of power generation from the plant.
I've read that when functioning this plant can power up to 800,000 homes.
Very often power loss can be filled by other sources since it's on a grid and all ties in. We see this all the time when power plants are offline or reduced for maintenance. But Oroville is key for renewable power generation so it will be interesting to see how that is affected number-wise.
One cold hard fact about Oroville is that is has NO chance of recovery until we get big wet storms in our rainy season. Thunderstorms will not do it. You have minimums you need to flow out so you don't kill the habitat below in the Feather river AND there are lots of customers downstream that depend on water coming out of Oroville.
Also....we still have evaporation....it's hot and long days will take water out of that lake as it evaporates into the air.
So that Lake is going to continue to go down...the question is how low?
We don't know...but if we don't get early storms...and over the last decade we haven't...it's going to be pretty low.
There are hard limits built into these lakes for what they are built for. We JUST learned this the hard way when Oroville went over 900 feet and the emergency spillway was used and that was REALLY bad.
The lesson we will learn soon is that as it drops...we come up on hard numbers and realities...soon it will be power then if it gets to 604...it becomes a dead pool.
Dead pool is when a lake is so low the remaining water doesn't reach intake pipes and water flow BELOW the dam is threatened.
We were close to this with Folsom Lake during the last drought. They were installing barges and pumps to keep some water flowing for the half million that depend on it as an emergency plan. Luckily...it did and they were not finished/used.
We have to think ahead on these things.
At one point...when the emergency spillway was falling apart everyone said...didn't they plan for this? Well it was a very inadequate plan based on hope because many thought they would never have to use it...well we did.
We need to think ahead....look at the charts...and plan for lower water and what would happen next.
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