Lake Oroville’s hydropower plant taken offline amid low water levels.
One of California’s biggest hydroelectric plants was taken offline Thursday after water levels at the Lake Oroville reservoir plummeted to historic lows, which authorities blamed on drought caused by climate change.
It was the first time the Hyatt Powerplant at Lake Oroville was shut down because of low lake levels since it was constructed, California Department of Water Resources Director Karla Nemeth said in a statement. Hyatt is the fourth largest hydroelectric energy producer in California, authorities said.
Nemeth said the department had worked with the California Independent Service Operator and the California Energy Commission to take steps “in anticipation of the loss of power generation,” but did not specify what those were.
A spokesperson for the Independent Service Operator said the agency doesn’t comment on individual resources in its system. The energy commission could not immediately be reached for comment. It was not clear how long
the shutdown would last or what the effect would be on electric supply and utility rates.
Lake Oroville is among the biggest reservoirs used for water storage and delivery as part of the California State Water Project, a system that supplies a majority of the state’s population and 750,000 acres of farmland. Each year, water agencies and other contractors that rely on the State Water Project for urban and agricultural use make requests for certain amounts of water. Because of the drought, the Department of Water Resources, which oversees the project, is delivering only 5% of those requests.
“Deliveries are being met almost entirely from storage at San Luis Reservoir in Merced County and those deliveries have little impact on the amount of water being stored or released from Lake Oroville” the agency said in a statement.
State records show that Lake Oroville was at 24% of capacity on Wednesday. The lake’s historical average for this time of year is 34% of capacity.
Earlier this week, the lake reached a record low of 642.73 feet of water, slightly below the previous low of 645 feet in September 1977.
According to a report from last year on the state’s energy production, California’s noncarbon dioxide emitting electric generation categories, including nuclear power, large hydroelectric generation and renewable sources, accounted for 51% of instate generation.
That is down from 57% in 2019, a change authorities said was because of dry conditions and reduced hydroelectric generation.
The amount of hydroelectricity the state produces varies each year with rainfall and snowmelt.
“This is just one of many unprecedented impacts we are experiencing in California as a result of our climateinduced drought,” Nemeth said. “California and much of the western part of the United States are experiencing the impacts of accelerated climate change, including recordlow reservoir levels due to dramatically reduced runoff this spring.”
The historic low levels were in stark contrast to four years ago when the dam’s operators released a torrent of water down Feather River, causing damage to the main spillway and forcing water to gush over an emergency spillway days later that resulted in the evacuations of nearly 200,000 people downstream.