> So it’s good the state wants to build additional reservoir capacity.
How likely is this to happen? As far as I understand it, the US, and specifically California, has mostly regulated away it's ability to build any additional infrastructure. This may be overstated, hard to know as someone not living there.
> The project was certified by Governor Gavin Newsom in November 2023 under SB 149, a new law that provides certified projects streamlining benefits regarding legal challenges filed under the California Environmental Quality Act.[10][11] Construction is scheduled to begin in 2024 with final design expected to be done in 2025 and be completed in 2030.
If it was not for discretionary exemptions to regulations, it would likely not have been possible. It's also quite dystopian to have regulations that can be overwritten by executive discretion. This is a recipe for corruption.
Law-permitted discretionary exemptions are reasonable in extremis which I think California’s water situation is, a couple of good years notwithstanding. People can find any number of ways to be corrupt as well all know.
Since you’re not in the US: California’s woes are vastly overstated. There are indeed real problems, but the government here is remarkably clean — shockingly so by the standards of East Coast States (original colonies) and in general California has a good track record of dealing with many major issues. We can all list unresolved longstanding problems we hate (my list is pretty much prisons, schools, housing NIMBYs and prop 13) but as a general rule they do ok.
Also this is non partisan. Geographically CA is mostly “MAGA red” but corruption etc is pretty thinly and uniformly spread around.
It’s hard to visualize vast quantities, but for people who live in the rural American west, an acre-foot is relatively easy to grasp. People know the land area of property they live on or farm in acres, and they can imagine what it would look like if that area was flooded with a foot of water.
If a farmer knows they have a 100 acre field and they know that their corn requires 2 feet of water per year, they know that they must acquire 200 acre-feet of water.
If the state’s rivers are overflowing and the farmer wants to flood their field and help to recharge the groundwater [1], acre-feet is the unit they’d use to calculate how much water they can accept (depending on how many feet tall their levees are).
California is 100 million acres and there are 10 million acres of crops.
Acre-foot is not an obsolete unit - it is frequently used in American when measuring large amounts of water for agriculture and reservoirs. It's about 325,000 gallons.
An acre-foot is evidently supposed to represent the expected water usage of a suburban house. 1.5 million acre-feet is 1.85 trillion liters, or the volume of 740,000 olympic swimming pools. None of those numbers really help me except that it's about 1.5 million households worth of water.
How likely is this to happen? As far as I understand it, the US, and specifically California, has mostly regulated away it's ability to build any additional infrastructure. This may be overstated, hard to know as someone not living there.