How L.A.’s Energy Transition Could Shake up the Southwest
The sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles, at the border between sea and desert, depends upon a vast network of resources from across the western United States. More than any other entity, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) manages this network, pulling water from hundreds of miles north and east in vast canals and wiring electricity from as far away as Utah and Oregon.
The early-1900s municipal water bureaucracy that would eventually become LADWP is infamous for its role in pilfering water from the Owens Valley as part of a real estate coup, dramatized in the 1974 film Chinatown. That episode began the construction of an enormous network of infrastructure projects in both the city and its hinterlands.
Initially powered by a series of hydroelectric plants along the length of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the city now relies on electricity from an array of power plants spread throughout the West: water, coal, gas, solar, nuclear and wind.
In 2018, the California legislature mandated a carbon-free electrical grid across the state by 2045. The following year, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced the city's own commitment to a Green New Deal. A city council resolution passed last September was more ambitious still, setting the target of 2035 for a fully decarbonized municipal energy mix. These plans have thrown LADWP’s existing infrastructural works into a state of flux—with effects that reach far beyond the city itself.
Los Angeles drinks the Sierra
At the end of the nineteenth century, the city’s water supply was controlled by the Los Angeles City Water Company, a stingy private operator which had for decades left the water system largely unimproved—instead using its monopoly privileges to pay shareholders exorbitant dividends. After four years of legal battles, the municipality took over the utility, resulting in the creation of the Los Angeles Department of Water in 1902. At the time, much of the city’s water supply came from seemingly plentiful aquifers supplied by the Los Angeles River. From 1900 to 1904, however, the city's population doubled to 200,000. The number of water connections in the city likewise increased substantially in both 1903 (by 75%) and 1904 (by another 25%), leading William Mulholland, the first Chief Engineer of the nascent public water department, to claim that “the time has come when we shall have to supplement [the supply] from some other source.”
The city turned its attention north, to the Owens River. Conveniently, the Owens Valley was 4,000 feet above sea level: transporting water to Los Angeles via aqueduct could be accomplished by gravity alone. Fred Eaton, former mayor of Los Angeles (from 1898 to 1900), posed as a cattle rancher and went on a buying spree, purchasing lands with water rights along the river 240 miles to the north. At the time, the settler community at the river’s base enjoyed richly productive farm and ranchlands, and the Owens Valley had been selected as a possible site for a large-scale public irrigation project by the newly created federal Reclamation Service to further develop the agricultural potential of the area. Officials from Los Angeles ultimately convinced the federal government to abandon the plan as the city rushed ahead with its own designs for the valley's water in secret.
The aqueduct was characterized by Mulholland and the Los Angeles Department of Water as necessary for survival: ensuring that a growing city would have enough water to subsist. But in truth the water supplied by the aqueduct would greatly exceed the city's domestic needs. Privately, a plan was afoot among a cadre of city elites to divert water not to residential taps but instead to citrus farmlands in the San Fernando Valley that would become significantly more valuable with the water’s arrival.
A trumped-up scarcity moreover justified the construction: when the city needed to sell more bonds to fund the aqueduct, writes Mark Arax in The Dreamt Land, Mulholland “fabricated numbers from inside the water department and ginned up a ‘water famine’ to make it appear as if the city were one drought away from being parched.” The scheme worked, and a pharaonic construction project laid concrete channels across hundreds of miles of desert. The aqueduct was completed in 1913. In the five years it took to build it, the city employed approximately 100,000 workers, with an average of 3,000 men active in construction at any given point in the process.
When the water tumbled over the final hillside into the city, Mulholland addressed the city's mayor before the assembled crowd of thousands: “There it is,” he famously said. “Take it.”
Los Angeles did just that, engorging itself on the new abundance provided by the aqueduct. To deal with its sudden water surplus, the city annexed an area in the following years, much of it in the San Fernando Valley, that would more than double its size.
Farming and ranching in the Owens Valley dwindled with the redirection of its water south. The arrival of water to the San Fernando Valley—three times more than what the pre-annexation city of Los Angeles used in the 1910s and early ’20s—enraged Owens Valley residents, who tried to fight the loss of their water with efforts ranging from preventing property sales to outsiders to dynamiting infrastructure. The conflict immediately offered a fruitful recruitment tool for the local Ku Klux Klan. New episodes of tension would flare up through the 1970s.
The Owens Valley still feels the effects of water diversion today. The dry bed of Owens Lake became a tremendous source of airborne dust, sickening nearby residents. When a court order in 2001 forced the DWP to mitigate these risks, the department set about creating what the Center for Land Use Interpretation has called “a cyborg, cubist version of a lake, fractured into fragments—gravel, grasses, tillage, furrows, wetlands, pools, shallows, depths, and islands—each engineered to perform a function”—with the minimal possible water. Today, dust has been significantly reduced, but the Owens Lake is less a lake than a mirage.
A Los Angeles the size of the Southwest
The distant water sourced by the original Los Angeles Department of Water wasn’t just for drinking and farming. From the outset, it also provided for the energy needs of the growing city.
In 1905, the city's first power plant was brought online, a hydroelectric station at Division Creek which was used to support construction of the aqueduct itself. The water in the aqueduct would come to power a chain of generating stations stretching from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles proper. Four years after the completion of the aqueduct, Power Plant #1, situated just north of Santa Clarita in the San Francisquito Canyon, began harnessing its flow to deliver hydroelectricity from the aqueduct to the city. By contemporary standards, the 9,375 kilowatts of power it provided when it came online is a vanishingly trivial amount; in 1917, this amounted to 97% of the power generated for the fledgling city.
The Department of Water would become the Bureau of Water Works and Supply in 1911, and consolidate with the Bureau of Power and Light to become LADWP in 1937.
As Los Angeles' power needs grew, the hydroelectric facilities along the aqueduct were supplemented by large power plants. The imperial city made further incursions into its hinterlands, both within the state and beyond. Most dramatically, the DWP's lobbying was crucial in the construction of the Hoover Dam on the Arizona-Nevada border in the 1930s, which became for a time the largest hydroelectric power generator in the world.
In the map above, larger dots represent power plants with higher power output capacities. | Map by Sammy Feldblum and John Schmidt using data from California Energy Commission
Today, LADWP's energy mix consists of nuclear, hydroelectric, solar, and wind, along with natural gas and coal. Non-renewable energy dominates grid capacity for the time being, and gas and coal make up about 40% of the city’s energy portfolio. Carbon-free energy, which includes non-renewables nuclear and hydro, comprises close to 60% of the city’s energy mix.
An array of tendrils connect Los Angeles to power stations in all directions. With the city’s target of 80% renewable energy by 2030 and a carbon free grid by 2035, the infrastructural system powering the city is being remade.
As part of the city’s green transition, three natural gas power plants along L.A.’s coast—Haynes, Harbor, and Scattergood—are slated for closure by 2029, a plan requiring a massive overhaul of the utility’s energy mix. As of 2020, natural gas accounted for 28% of LADWP’s power supply, much of which comes from the coastal plants.
LADWP is planning to offset the losses in generating capability through a yet-to-be-determined mix of rooftop and non-rooftop solar throughout the city, wind farms, and the conversion of remaining natural gas plants to burn “green hydrogen” generated by renewable energy — a relatively new and for now costly technology yet to be implemented at utility scale. One of the facilities set to make the switch to this fuel is the Intermountain Power Plant in Delta, Utah, the largest-capacity generating station in LADWP’s energy mix and the last to run on coal.
The fuel isn’t the only thing that will change at the plant. “We know that the coal-fired power plant provides lots of jobs where it is for local residents,” says Stephanie Pincetl, director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities and professor-in-residence at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability. “It also pollutes the air. It also uses water, all these issues. A transition to natural gas will continue to generate a fair amount of employment. When you move to renewables, to solar, it doesn’t have that kind of employment benefit. So part of the dilemma for the just transition is the jobs dilemma.”
Indeed, the job losses from winding down the natural gas stations have spurred vociferous resistance to L.A.’s Green New Deal from the union representing their workers, IBEW-18.
As with water, then, the energy needs of Los Angeles imprint themselves socially across the region; the life and occasional death of the facilities supporting the megalopolis change the fortunes of the communities in which they operate.
The late Navajo Generating Station, just outside of Page, AZ on the Navajo Nation, offers another illustrative case study of the far-flung effects of L.A.’s power needs. One of four plants built on or adjacent to Navajo territory during the coal boom of the sixties and seventies, the NGS continued a long twentieth-century history of extraction on the reservation—first oil, then uranium and coal.
The station came online in 1974, operated by the Arizona-based utility Salt River Project. From the outset, LADWP had a 21% ownership stake in the project. It burned coal from the nearby Kayenta Mine at the foot of Black Mesa, and by the late aughts the plant, mine, and connecting railroad employed more than 900 workers, ninety percent of whom were Native American.
The costs were more dispersed: each year, the plant and mine emitted 20 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gasses, as well as thousands of pounds of mercury, selenium and arsenic. Water, scarce in a region that averages less than a foot of rainfall annually, was also an issue. Peabody Energy, owner and operator of the Kayenta Mine, pumped from the aquifer beneath Navajo Nation, which corresponded with drops in the water table over decades, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The aquifer was Black Mesa residents' only source of drinking water.
For forty years, the plant sent its power to Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, through a dendritic array of transmission lines.
Map by Sammy Feldblum and John Schmidt using data from Arizona State Land Department, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data.
But all of this, the windfalls and the toxins, was thrown into flux by the plant's premature closure. In 2016, LADWP sold its 21 percent stake in an effort to wean itself off coal within a decade. This presaged the closure of the plant entirely three years later, and with it the pollution and water use, the hundreds of jobs, and the more than fifty million dollars of royalties, water-use fees and the like paid to Navajo and Hopi nations annually.
In December 2020, a little over a year after the Navajo Generating Station was decommissioned, its three large smokestacks were destroyed.
After 42 years of exporting coal power to Los Angeles and across the Southwest, at least 15,000 families in the sparsely populated Navajo Nation remain without electricity.
In recognition of this fact, this past September the Los Angeles City Council voted for LADWP to participate in the nation’s Light Up Navajo initiative, partnering with the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority to continue installing electrical infrastructure on tribal territory. Simultaneously, the council has begun discussions to import energy from a planned Navajo solar buildout that would replicate the wattage of the shuttered coal plant. As past efforts at green energy buildouts on the reservation have faltered due to insufficient social support, the direction of the coming transition is far from settled yet.
“There are a lot of heretofore not-problem problems” on the path to decarbonization, says Pincetl, director of the California Center for Sustainable Communities. “The deadline is very soon for such a big, complex transition. I think the power side of LADWP is sincerely grappling with that.”
As with the diversion of water south to Los Angeles a century ago, green transitions present a new set of opportunities for well-situated actors to profit, from lithium mining operations in Nevada and the Salton Sea to the construction of huge new wind farms in New Mexico. These profit opportunities will shape how the region responds to a changing climate. Yet as a municipal energy utility—the largest in the continental U.S.—LADWP is at least formally under democratic control, with rates and future directions determined by City Council.
That status facilitates public participation in LADWP planning for Angelenos. For affected populations elsewhere, the process is murkier. “I think as we saw over the battle for the east side of the Sierra [over Owens Lake], and issues around Mono Lake and the rest, that it takes an enormous amount of political organizing and political clout to address some of the adverse impacts of LADWP’s operations,” says Pincetl. “For water, I think that they have been relatively successful. But for the question of power, I would say that that issue has not come up in the same way yet.”
It will soon: ongoing changes to the city’s energy mix will affect communities throughout the vast network sustaining Southern California’s metropolis. Only through attention to the social life of water and power, and to the history through which this network was produced, can the coming transition bring about a flourishing collective future.
April 27, 2022: A prior version of this article stated that gas and coal dominate L.A’s current energy grid. This article has been corrected to say that non-renewables, which include hydro and nuclear, dominate the grid.
