Central Valley Project

Literally a few miles away from that solar plant, we know the Monterey Shale formation has huge amounts of natural gas.

We know that the land is hilly and unfarmable and arid, unlike the rich San Joaquin Valley supplied by the Central Valley Project and the, uh, State Water Project.

And so what I'm getting at is it would be so much easier to tap natural gas right there in the coast range above I-five and build a three hundred or four hundred acre natural gas generation plant and use the water, uh, from one of the reservoirs, you know.

Right.

California water contracts gain certainty after ruling.

The Ninth Circuit has strengthened long-term contract certainty for holders of nearly 3 million acre-feet of annual Central Valley project supply.

The ruling leaves a separate risk untouched – whether the water will actually be available when businesses need it.

A federal water contract can now last indefinitely while the amount of water delivered under it still changes dramatically from one year to the next.

That distinction sits at the center of a Ninth Circuit ruling issued Monday, Center for Biological Diversity , U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, No. 25-5137, involving the Central Valley Project, the federal network of reservoirs, dams, canals, and power plants supplying farms, communities, and businesses across California.

The court upheld the federal government's conversion of 67 water service contracts into repayment contracts without individual environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act or consultation under the Endangered Species Act.

Those contracts cover almost 3 million acre-feet of water annually, subject to availability, and another 16 contracts have been proposed for conversion.

Environmental review has not disappeared.

So they have figured out how to access the groundwater.

Now, we talk about Central Valley Project and State Water Project that actually moves water from Sierra Nevada to the Central Valley of California.

I mean, think, think about the long state of California, most of the water is in the northeast of the state.

We move that water to this valley and to the cities in the Southern California.

Which is the whole central part of California.

Exa- This whole Central Valley is basically, because that's the central part of California.

Now, both State Water Project and Central Valley Project were partly done because the groundwater was declining, and there was subsidence, and they had to figure out how to help farmers to continue growing their, what they're growing, but get them off groundwater.

But neither of those ever put a cap on how much groundwater these people can use.