Industrial Hydropower Production
in the Mono Basin

POWER DISTRIBUTION SILHOUETTE

Go almost anywhere near a paved road, and you'll find these. They are carrying electricity from power plants to power consumers--you and me. Around here, renewable sources of energy are being intensively tapped: falling water and geothermal heat. On Rush Creek, there are three reservoirs and a power plant, and the same exists on Lee Vining Creek. On Mill Creek, there is one reservoir and a power plant. All feed electricity into the grid. You might think this is good... renewable energy, right?

MILL CREEK DRY AS A BONE

There are side effects, however. Mill Creek below Lundy Reservoir is usually dry. A small tributary enters it just downstream of here and sometimes flows all the way to Mono Lake. Cottonwoods at the delta near Mono Lake are severely stressed--big, beautiful, old cottonwoods that hint at the once-rich riparian forest that has given its life so that you can waste electricity.

MEANWHILE, THE WATER FINDS ITS WAY TO MONO LAKE

After flowing through the Lundy Powerhouse, a small amount of water can be returned to Mill Creek through a mile-long ditch, while most of the water is released into a ditch called Wilson Creek. Other irrigation ditches come off of it. This ditch has carried water in places for about a century, and it looks like a pretty, grassy, willow-lined creek in places. A tame, civilized, domesticated creek. Until it flows into the Arroyo. It has cut a spectacular gully, deep and narrow, and continues to actively cut it (see muddy water in photo). Once I saw a piece of the wall fall into the creek, a big cloud of dust was kicked up, and the water was muddy for a while downstream (and I had the nerve to kayak down this section!).

ACTIVE EROSION VS. COTTONWOOD WETLAND

The erosion you see here is taking place at the bottom of the big gully, and just downstream Wilson Creek is burying shoreline wetlands with the sediment. Meanwhile, giant dying cottonwoods thirst for water at the nearby mouth of Mill Creek. Now, we can't fix this problem just by conserving electricity (2 acre-feet of water = 1 MWh at the Lundy Power Plant). A larger ditch would have to be constructed to return water in excess of water rights from Wilson to Mill Creek. The only way this will happen is if the government agencies that we trust to regulate resource users (FERC, USFS, BLM, SWRCB, PUC) decide to do something about it in the same way they decided that LA should return water to the other Mono Basin streams.

TOO UGLY TO IMAGINE
I have to wait until October to show you a picture of this one, but it is terribly ugly! Waugh Dam inundates Rush Creek Meadows deep in the Ansel Adams Wilderness only 3 miles from Yosemite National Park. The reservoir is drawn down for 8 months every year, and it is an ugly clearcut mudflat with crystal clear Rush Creek flowing through it. From my calculations (based on 1 acre-foot = 1 MWh at the Rush Creek Power Plant), 13,699 households eliminating one 100-watt light bulb left on from 8pm to 6am would eliminate the need for Waugh Dam and Reservoir. This could also reduce light pollution and would save people money. Or, 2,283 homes installing a 6KW per day solar photovoltaic system such as I did would do the job. The $11 million cost would be fully paid back in electricity savings in less than 20 years.

EVER HIKE UP THE INDUSTRIAL RUSH CREEK TRAIL?

The other hydropower facilities in the Mono Basin are the lesser of two evils. The power they generate displaces fossil-fuel generated power, nuclear power, and hydropower that kills salmon and wrecks larger rivers. So steep parts of Rush Creek and Lee Vining Creek are dry and their beautiful waterfalls only appear in wet years, and their life-giving floods are tempered, but this is the price we pay so that we can forego nuclear and fossil fuel energy. There still is a tremendous amount of room for conservation and development of solar and wind and other less-destructive renewable energy sources, however. Visit www.ssolar.com to install your energy independence!

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