If you leave aside the somewhat silly world of bottled water, there has been almost no innovation in the industry of water for decades. A water facility today uses the exact same technology it did in 1973. In what other industry is that the case? The typical Wal-Mart long-haul truck has more intelligence in it than the typical water system.
The technological revolution has completely bypassed the world of water, mostly because of the strange nature of the market for it. Water has almost no pricing signals. You can’t trade it. And while in the developed world you don’t typically run out, if serious scarcity develops, you can’t just buy more, no matter how much you’re willing to pay. The most liquid and plentiful natural resource on the planet is almost completely illiquid as an asset.
Actually, I’d be surprised if many water systems are not using microprocessors, for example, or other technologies in their systems. The “exact same technology [as] 1973″ sounds a little over dramatic. But “strange nature of the market for it” is right.
Fishman has a new book out on water supply, The Big Thirst. (More: A WSJ review of The Big Thirst, the book’s website: http://www.thebigthirst.com/.) Fishman’s prior book was The Wal-Mart Effect, so perhaps he really knows something about how smart those long haul trucks are.
Ogallala Aquifer image from High Plains Underground Water Conservation District #1 website
Texans who have drawn there water supplies from the vast but shrinking Ogallala Aquifer are engaged in a complex process of clarifying and/or renegotiating a more exact notion of just what rights they have to access the resource. A story in the Sunday Lubbock Avalanche-Journal provides an update.
Some clever “enviropreneurs”, to invoke a term coined by PERC, have devised methods to use markets to improve the use of water. See “How the market can keep streams flowing” for an example of a program working in the Pacific Northwest. But that example deals with surface water; groundwater presents greater difficulties for measuring and monitoring resource stocks and flows.
Groundwater gets some mention in this article by Gary Libecap on “Water Woes” in the American West, but it looks like a complete groundwater rights system remains to be developed.
Metering water use will be a part of a solution. Palm Springs, California has experimented with smart metering for water use with some time-of-day pricing – partly to economize on electric power use but also to encourage conservation of water. Clearly a different kind of application than West Texas needs, but it suggests some possibilities.
Has anyone put together a groundwater rights system that works on a large scale, or is this still a grand opportunity waiting for the right enviropreneur?
The TED talk was just posted on the TED website, but a little searching around reveals that the smart water/markets/environment people were already aware. TEDx had the video up on youtube a few months ago, as Shawn Regan of PERCnoticed in December.
Here is bit from the Zetland interview beginning just after the 9:00 minute mark, where Harmon describes his visit to a stream that would have been dry in August but for the water restoration certificate program:
So, I decided this is a nice view from the bridge – you get the long view, you can see for a ways, you get the beaver dam.
But let’s go down and look right at the water. I walk down and I brought my camera with me and I looked in the water and I saw movement. And a stared and I stared and I stared, and I suddenly focused at the right depth and there were hundreds of baby steelheads. […]
Ordinarily, for the last ten, twenty, fifty years there would be no water for them to hatch into, they’d just die. […]
So, basically, here is habitat for all of these fish that ordinarily would not have habitat. It was a very sort of , it was a very sort of rubber meets the road sort of experience for me, sort of fish meet the water.
It went from the process, for me, of writing the contract, putting a business plan together, figuring out the website and the water calculator there on the website, and all of the things you do to make a business like this work, to actually seeing the results right before my eyes. That was very fulfilling, really nice to see actual ecological benefits right in front of me. (Unofficial transcript, parts edited out, use at your own risk.)
An interesting element here is that no laws needed to be changed to allow the program to work. The program works with the existing water laws in Oregon, Washington, and Montana. But for decades that law had led to regulation, extensive litigation, and dry stream beds because owners of water rights had to use their water rights in order to preserve them, and using involved withdrawing the water from the stream.
Until this program came along, there was no mechanism to allow water rights holders to use their rights to preserve in-stream flows. BEF does the necessary legwork: identifying streams at risk, tracking water flows, issuing certificates, and so on all the way up to bringing together willing buyers and willing sellers.
ASIDE: Next time a misguided free-market economist tells me markets can’t be designed, they can only emerge spontaneously, I am going to point to this example.
