Partnerships: The Key to Successful Climate Change Resilience and Adaptation within the Water and Power Utility Industry

Abstract:

The Turlock Irrigation District (TID), a vertically integrated electrical and water public utility, strives to make investments and decisions to benefit and protect our customers in a proactive manner. This is especially true in the way in which TID approaches the operations of the Don Pedro Reservoir, a 2 million acre-feet Reservoir the Tuolumne watershed. Over the last several decades, the hydrology on the Tuolumne River system has increased in volatility requiring operators to adapt Don Pedro’s operations to accommodate for these changes while still meeting its environmental, water supply, flood control, and energy demands. Operating a system originally built with the assumption of stationary climatology in the face of climate change has required TID to seek and strengthen its partnerships with governmental, public, and private entities to cultivate creativity and flexibility within a historically rigid framework.

Partnerships and work by other scientists and stakeholders have contributed to the development of new methods and philosophies that turn data into usable intelligence for decision-making and have already paid off in both extreme wet and dry years. To continue being proactive, TID needs continuous stochastic climate/weather analysis to bound the hydrologic extremes, which will allow TID to perform proper risk analysis to wisely invest in climate change adaptions for infrastructure and most importantly for the development of operational tools and approaches.