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Inside California’s audacious plan to stash more than a trillion gallons of water underground
The world is slowly but surely running out of groundwater. A resource that for centuries has seemed unending is being lapped up faster than nature can replenish it.
“Globally speaking, there’s a groundwater crisis,” said Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment. “We have treated groundwater as a free and limitless source of water in effect, even as we have learned that it’s not that.”
Aquifers are the porous, sponge-like bodies of rock underground that store groundwater; they can be tapped by wells and discharge naturally at springs or wetlands. Especially in places that have already been hard-hit by climate change, many aquifers have become so depleted that humans need to step in; the Arabian Aquifer in Saudi Arabia and the Murzuk-Djado Basin in North Africa, per a 2015 study, are particularly stressed and have little hope of recharging. In the U.S., aquifers are depleting fast from the Pacific Northwest to the Gulf, but drought-stricken California is the poster-child of both water stress and efforts to undo the damage.
In March, the state approved plans to actively replenish its groundwater after months of being inundated by unexpected levels of rainfall. While this move is not brand-new — the state’s Water Resources Control Board has been structuring water restrictions to encourage enhanced aquifer recharge since 2015 in the brief windows when California has water to spare — the scale of this year’s effort is unprecedented.
But just how will all that flood water get back underground? California’s approach, which promotes flooding certain fields and letting the water seep down slowly through soil and rocks to the aquifers below, represents just one potential technique. There are others, from injecting water straight into wells to developing pits and basins designed specifically for infiltration. It’s a plumbing challenge on an unprecedented scale.
The act of putting water back into aquifers has a number of unglamorous names — enhanced aquifer recharge, water banking, artificial groundwater recharge, and aquifer storage and recovery, among others — with some nuanced differences between them. But they all mean roughly the same thing: increasing the amount of water that infiltrates into the ground and ultimately into aquifers.
This can have the overall effect of smoothing the high peaks and deep valleys of water supply in places dealing with extreme weather fluctuations. The idea is to capture the extra water that floods during periods of intense rainfall, and bank it for use during droughts. (While aquifers can also be recharged using any old freshwater, water rights are so complicated in the West that floodwater often represents “the only surface water that’s not spoken for,” Thomas Harter, a groundwater hydrology professor at U.C. Davis, told local television outlet KCRA.)
Recharge has the potential added benefit of protecting groundwater from saltwater intrusion. As water is pumped from a coastal aquifer, water from the ocean can seep in to fill the empty space, potentially poisoning the well for future use for agriculture or drinking water. It’s a risk that will only get bigger as the climate warms and sea levels rise.
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According to the Environmental Protection Agency, aquifer recharge is most often used in places where groundwater demand is high and increasing even as supply remains limited. These tend to be places with lots of people and lots of farms; the San Joaquin Valley, which is the focus of California’s current plan, checks all of those boxes. Aquifers are the source of nearly 40% of water used by farms and cities in California, per the Public Policy Institute of California, and more in dry years. And, until 2023, most recent years have been dry.
In response to this year’s sudden reversal of California’s water fortunes, the state’s Water Board — which regulates water rights — allowed local contractors of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to move up to 600,000 acre-feet of water, or well over a trillion gallons, to places that normally would be off-limits this time of year. Those contractors, who are largely farmers and other major landowners, have until July 30 to take advantage.
“California is essentially the pilot project for how we want to do this in the future,” said Erik Ekdahl, deputy director for the Water Board’s water rights division. It won’t be until the end of the year that the state will know exactly how much water was successfully banked, but Ekdahl said anecdotally that some contractors have already taken steps to put the spare water underground.
This comes as California’s enormous snowpack begins to melt: a potential boon for the aquifers that could also mean problematic and dangerous floods for the communities downstream of the runoff.
How does enhanced aquifer recharge actually happen? It’s not as if the vast underground stretches of rock and sediment have faucets or even obvious holes leading to their watery depths. People aiming to reverse the centuries-long trend of drawing up water without actively replacing it have a range of artificial recharge options, which either speed along the natural seepage process or direct water straight to the aquifer below.
In the former cases, one option is to allow water to flood fields left fallow, a process known as “surface spreading,” as is beginning to happen in the San Joaquin Valley.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Water can also be directed to dedicated recharge basins and canals. In both cases, excess water is absorbed by fast-draining soil, which encourages it to pass below ground. Aside from the technical challenge of redirecting water from typical flood patterns, these approaches tend to be low-tech.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
But in cases of aquifer depletion where those approaches are impractical — such as when the aquifer is under impermeable rock — injection wells represent a direct connection to the groundwater. These are either deep pits that drain into sedimentary layers above an underground drinking water source (like a traditional well functioning in reverse), or else webs of tubes and casing that blast water straight into the source.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Cities are also experimenting with aquifer recharge on a smaller scale. For urban stormwater, the EPA promotes certain “green infrastructure” approaches that mold the built environment to mimic natural hydrology. For instance, shallow channels lined with vegetation, known as bioswales, redirect stormwater while encouraging it to seep through the ground. Permeable pavement — in use in several Northeastern states — works much the same way. Meanwhile, rain gardens designed to prevent flooding have the added benefit of replenishing groundwater.
Determining when and where to use different approaches to aquifer recharge, though, can be unclear. We are still a long way from widespread or coordinated adoption of these techniques, but researchers are working on weighing their costs and benefits.
Supported by a $2 million EPA grant, Kiparsky is part of a U.C. Berkeley team looking at how to make California-esque recharge work on a national scale. , including by developing a cost-benefit tool for water managers. Some of the geochemical and physical considerations are relatively simple to measure: Is the soil in question porous? Are there gravel-filled “paleo valleys” that could allow water to rapidly seep to the aquifers below, as one 2022 study found?
More complicated, potentially immeasurable, but no less important are the legal and regulatory considerations around water rights. It is, as Kiparsky put it, one of the quintessential modern examples of the tragedy of the commons. Whether the government will be able to entice individuals to use their own little corner of Earth to fill an aquifer for the benefit of the many is an open question.
But Kiparsky is fairly optimistic that recharge will take hold in years where there is water to spare, as the West recognizes that future drought must be prepared for, especially when it’s raining.
“Is recharge going to become a bigger part of water management? I would say absolutely,” he said. “I’m not usually in the game of making predictions, but I would predict the answer is yes. When we can figure out how to do it.”
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New York City may very well be the epicenter of this particular fight.
It’s official: the Moss Landing battery fire has galvanized a gigantic pipeline of opposition to energy storage systems across the country.
As I’ve chronicled extensively throughout this year, Moss Landing was a technological outlier that used outdated battery technology. But the January incident played into existing fears and anxieties across the U.S. about the dangers of large battery fires generally, latent from years of e-scooters and cellphones ablaze from faulty lithium-ion tech. Concerned residents fighting projects in their backyards have successfully seized upon the fact that there’s no known way to quickly extinguish big fires at energy storage sites, and are winning particularly in wildfire-prone areas.
How successful was Moss Landing at enlivening opponents of energy storage? Since the California disaster six months ago, more than 6 gigawatts of BESS has received opposition from activists explicitly tying their campaigns to the incident, Heatmap Pro® researcher Charlie Clynes told me in an interview earlier this month.
Matt Eisenson of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Law agreed that there’s been a spike in opposition, telling me that we are currently seeing “more instances of opposition to battery storage than we have in past years.” And while Eisenson said he couldn’t speak to the impacts of the fire specifically on that rise, he acknowledged that the disaster set “a harmful precedent” at the same time “battery storage is becoming much more present.”
“The type of fire that occurred there is unlikely to occur with modern technology, but the Moss Landing example [now] tends to come up across the country,” Eisenson said.
Some of the fresh opposition is in rural agricultural communities such as Grundy County, Illinois, which just banned energy storage systems indefinitely “until the science is settled.” But the most crucial place to watch seems to be New York City, for two reasons: One, it’s where a lot of energy storage is being developed all at once; and two, it has a hyper-saturated media market where criticism can receive more national media attention than it would in other parts of the country.
Someone who’s felt this pressure firsthand is Nick Lombardi, senior vice president of project development for battery storage company NineDot Energy. NineDot and other battery storage developers had spent years laying the groundwork in New York City to build out the energy storage necessary for the city to meet its net-zero climate goals. More recently they’ve faced crowds of protestors against a battery storage facility in Queens, and in Staten Island endured hecklers at public meetings.
“We’ve been developing projects in New York City for a few years now, and for a long time we didn’t run into opposition to our projects or really any sort of meaningful negative coverage in the press. All of that really changed about six months ago,” Lombardi said.
The battery storage developer insists that opposition to the technology is not popular and represents a fringe group. Lombardi told me that the company has more than 50 battery storage sites in development across New York City, and only faced “durable opposition” at “three or four sites.” The company also told me it has yet to receive the kind of email complaint flood that would demonstrate widespread opposition.
This is visible in the politicians who’ve picked up the anti-BESS mantle: GOP mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa’s become a champion for the cause, but mayor Eric Adams’ “City of Yes” campaign itself would provide for the construction of these facilities. (While Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has not focused on BESS, it’s quite unlikely the climate hawkish democratic socialist would try to derail these projects.)
Lombardi told me he now views Moss Landing as a “catalyst” for opposition in the NYC metro area. “Suddenly there’s national headlines about what’s happening,” he told me. “There were incidents in the past that were in the news, but Moss Landing was headline news for a while, and that combined with the fact people knew it was happening in their city combined to create a new level of awareness.”
He added that six months after the blaze, it feels like developers in the city have a better handle on the situation. “We’ve spent a lot of time in reaction to that to make sure we’re organized and making sure we’re in contact with elected officials, community officials, [and] coordinated with utilities,” Lombardi said.
And more on the biggest conflicts around renewable energy projects in Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland.
1. St. Croix County, Wisconsin - Solar opponents in this county see themselves as the front line in the fight over Trump’s “Big Beautiful” law and its repeal of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
2. Barren County, Kentucky - How much wood could a Wood Duck solar farm chuck if it didn’t get approved in the first place? We may be about to find out.
3. Iberia Parish, Louisiana - Another potential proxy battle over IRA tax credits is going down in Louisiana, where residents are calling to extend a solar moratorium that is about to expire so projects can’t start construction.
4. Baltimore County, Maryland – The fight over a transmission line in Maryland could have lasting impacts for renewable energy across the country.
5. Worcester County, Maryland – Elsewhere in Maryland, the MarWin offshore wind project appears to have landed in the crosshairs of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.
6. Clark County, Ohio - Consider me wishing Invenergy good luck getting a new solar farm permitted in Ohio.
7. Searcy County, Arkansas - An anti-wind state legislator has gone and posted a slide deck that RWE provided to county officials, ginning up fresh uproar against potential wind development.
Talking local development moratoria with Heatmap’s own Charlie Clynes.
This week’s conversation is special: I chatted with Charlie Clynes, Heatmap Pro®’s very own in-house researcher. Charlie just released a herculean project tracking all of the nation’s county-level moratoria and restrictive ordinances attacking renewable energy. The conclusion? Essentially a fifth of the country is now either closed off to solar and wind entirely or much harder to build. I decided to chat with him about the work so you could hear about why it’s an important report you should most definitely read.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s dive in.
Tell me about the project you embarked on here.
Heatmap’s research team set out last June to call every county in the United States that had zoning authority, and we asked them if they’ve passed ordinances to restrict renewable energy, or if they have renewable energy projects in their communities that have been opposed. There’s specific criteria we’ve used to determine if an ordinance is restrictive, but by and large, it’s pretty easy to tell once a county sends you an ordinance if it is going to restrict development or not.
The vast majority of counties responded, and this has been a process that’s allowed us to gather an extraordinary amount of data about whether counties have been restricting wind, solar and other renewables. The topline conclusion is that restrictions are much worse than previously accounted for. I mean, 605 counties now have some type of restriction on renewable energy — setbacks that make it really hard to build wind or solar, moratoriums that outright ban wind and solar. Then there’s 182 municipality laws where counties don’t have zoning jurisdiction.
We’re seeing this pretty much everywhere throughout the country. No place is safe except for states who put in laws preventing jurisdictions from passing restrictions — and even then, renewable energy companies are facing uphill battles in getting to a point in the process where the state will step in and overrule a county restriction. It’s bad.
Getting into the nitty-gritty, what has changed in the past few years? We’ve known these numbers were increasing, but what do you think accounts for the status we’re in now?
One is we’re seeing a high number of renewables coming into communities. But I think attitudes started changing too, especially in places that have been fairly saturated with renewable energy like Virginia, where solar’s been a presence for more than a decade now. There have been enough projects where people have bad experiences that color their opinion of the industry as a whole.
There’s also a few narratives that have taken shape. One is this idea solar is eating up prime farmland, or that it’ll erode the rural character of that area. Another big one is the environment, especially with wind on bird deaths, even though the number of birds killed by wind sounds big until you compare it to other sources.
There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.
Are people saying no outright to renewable energy? Or is this saying yes with some form of reasonable restrictions?
It depends on where you look and how much solar there is in a community.
One thing I’ve seen in Virginia, for example, is counties setting caps on the total acreage solar can occupy, and those will be only 20 acres above the solar already built, so it’s effectively blocking solar. In places that are more sparsely populated, you tend to see restrictive setbacks that have the effect of outright banning wind — mile-long setbacks are often insurmountable for developers. Or there’ll be regulations to constrict the scale of a project quite a bit but don’t ban the technologies outright.
What in your research gives you hope?
States that have administrations determined to build out renewables have started to override these local restrictions: Michigan, Illinois, Washington, California, a few others. This is almost certainly going to have an impact.
I think the other thing is there are places in red states that have had very good experiences with renewable energy by and large. Texas, despite having the most wind generation in the nation, has not seen nearly as much opposition to wind, solar, and battery storage. It’s owing to the fact people in Texas generally are inclined to support energy projects in general and have seen wind and solar bring money into these small communities that otherwise wouldn’t get a lot of attention.