| Imperial Irrigation District: Course Correction |
| Utility | |||
| Written by John Zorabedian | |||
| Thursday, 01 May 2008 | |||
 In the contest between booming San Diego and the agricultural lands of the Imperial Valley, only water conservation will keep both growing.
 Mike Campbell, COO To reduce its own consumption by 303,000 acre-feet annually (an acre-foot is equal to roughly 325,000 gallons), IID will implement a conservation plan over the next 30 years called the Definite Plan. This plan, explained Mike Campbell, the irrigation district’s COO, encompasses efforts to better manage water in the valley’s network of canals, laterals, and drainage ditches, and to reduce water usage in the fields through improved farming and irrigation techniques. “We do recognize that we hold the lion’s share of the water,” Campbell said. “It is a very precious resource, so people are willing to pay dearly for it. The QSA is an opportunity to share this scarce resource with others who need to have it.” San Diego agreed to pay IID for water, agriculture conservation improvements, and upgrades to its irrigation system—roughly $90 million a year over the life of the contract—helping the district with major projects over the next few years to improve its canals, including lining a 23-mile stretch of the All American Canal, to prevent seepage, saving an estimated 67,700 acre-feet annually. Other conservation efforts include improvements to the system of gates used to direct the flow of water into the fields and technology upgrades that will allow the district to automate much of its system. Ditch duty Since the Depression era, the valley’s irrigation system—which depends on gravity and a series of gates to feed the water through those 1,600 miles of canals, laterals and 1,400 miles of drain ditches—has been operated by hand. Workers known as zanjeros, which is Spanish for overseer of the ditch, measure the flow of water and operate the gates by hand. This old-fashioned method has worked for generations, but a gradual move toward automation will be necessary to reduce human error and waste. “It’s not totally unsophisticated—they’ve been doing it for 75 years, and these people know their business real well. But there is a degree of human error to it,” Campbell said. “The expectation is that at some point in time, our zanjeros will have laptops so they can get orders without coming into the office and report the flows and measurements on a real-time basis.” IID expects that improvements to the canal system and automation of the distribution to fields through the gates operated by zanjeros will account for approximately 120,000 to a maximum of 150,000 acre-feet of the total conservation effort. The remaining 180,000 acre-feet will be conserved through on-farm improvements such as collecting runoff and more efficient use of crop rotation and planting techniques. To get to the 303,000 acre-feet annual conservation under the Definite Plan will take time—in increments of several thousand acre-feet of water over the course of the 30-year plan. Reaching that total will require dramatic changes in the way IID controls all the water in the valley. For the zanjeros, that will mean transitioning from traditional practices and using technology to improve processes. As this workforce of hundreds of ditch-tenders ages, a younger, smaller group of workers will take over in this capacity. “There’s no doubt that’s going to be a challenging opportunity,” Campbell said. “We’re taking a sophisticated yet manual activity and automating it. As many of the zanjeros get closer to retirement, and because in this day and age, the life of the zanjero isn’t something people necessarily dream of, we need to make that a position that is less reliant on a large manual workforce.” On the farm conservation side, funding from the contract with San Diego is supporting research efforts to improve irrigation efficiency. In April, researchers began conducting ride-alongs with zanjeros to inspect the laterals that feed water from the canals into the individual fields. This research is still in the initial stages, Campbell said. Salton Sea resource One of the most prominent geographical features of the Imperial Valley is the Salton Sea, a saline lake that covers almost 400 square miles, the largest lake in California. The lake was formed in 1905, when flooding from the Colorado River filled the area, which is below sea level and sits upon a sink. At the southern edge of the lake, CalEnergy has built a series of geothermal power plants, tapping into the heat below the Earth’s crust. Total geothermal capacity in the Imperial Valley is estimated to be over 2,000 megawatts, more than enough to power the entire valley, with enough capacity left over to sell energy to San Diego. IID, which does not own any geothermal power plants itself, has transmission capacity throughout the valley, and it recently approved a $75 million transmission line connecting the west and east sides of the valley. As San Diego seeks more water from the valley, it also needs more energy, and IID wants to sell it geothermal power through its transmission lines. The utility San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) also wants to access the geothermal energy in the Imperial Valley, but it has made a proposal to build a 500-kilovolt transmission line, called the Sunrise Power Link, through the valley that would bisect the prime agricultural lands that are the economic lifeblood of the county. IID opposes this plan and prefers a link across its existing infrastructure, a southern route out of the valley toward San Diego. “We have a rather large, sophisticated and substantial transmission network in and out of the Imperial Valley,” Campbell said. “That’s where our biggest opportunity resides—how do we continue to leverage our transmission lines for the advantage of private companies, some of them investor-owned utilities? Our recommendation is for SDG&E to follow the existing southern route, either by upgrading the line or building a parallel line.” SDG&E claims a northern route out of the valley would give it greater diversity of lines and protect it against liability from wildfires caused by transmission lines, Campbell said. But IID’s position is based on preserving the valley’s agricultural resources, even as it shares its energy resources with the sprawling city to its west. “If SDG&E would build its own line, it would bypass our existing transmission system, so we’re worried about stranded investment,” Campbell said. “We’re one of the poorest counties in California—$75 million is a lot of money for these people.” |
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American Executive is a RedCoat Publishing publication.
American Executive is a RedCoat Publishing publication.
