Boone Can Take Your Land

Boone Pickens's Roberts County Freshwater Supply District has the power to take land by eminent domain for its planned water lines, and use the same land to run electric lines, thanks to a Lege action last session. That public power exercised by Mr. Pickens and his employees doesn't sit well with our dry friends to the west.

But state legislators and rural landowners like Horton are balking at a project that exports water from a waning aquifer and an arrangement that seems to give a private project the public's power to take land.

"It just offends me that a farce would allow eminent domain to apply," [rancher Kenneth] Horton said.

Property owners along a 250-mile stretch between Roberts and Jack counties received letters in April alerting them of the proposed pipeline route. The letters, from the Roberts County Freshwater Supply District and Mesa Power, took the latest step in what even its detractors call an ingenious business plan.
...
An amendment that seemed to attract little notice in the last legislative session allows wind energy projects to use right of way held by a freshwater district to host transmission lines from wind energy projects. That works nicely for an enormous Pickens wind farm planned to supply up to 4,000 megawatts of power.

The Water Energy Nexus

Ever heard of it?

"It takes energy to move water, and it takes a lot of water to make energy," said Michael Webber, the associate director at the University of Texas' Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy.
..

"Conserving water and conserving energy are synonymous," Webber, one of the report's authors, told a Senate panel in April.

He said renewable energies from wind turbines and solar panels require almost no water to operate. But he warned that some unconventional alternatives can make matters worse: Desalination plants produce potable water, but they require a lot of energy. Biofuels can substitute for foreign oil, but they require lots of water.

...

About a fifth of water drawn from the Colorado River is used by power plants from Austin down to Matagorda, said Suzanne Zarling, executive manager of water services at the Lower Colorado River Authority.

And power plants hoping to locate along the Colorado River's banks have put out feelers for possible water use that, taken together, would roughly equal all the water available during drought in the Highland Lakes, or about 445,000 acre-feet a year.

Of course, in-stream uses of water for power plant cooling aren't the same as shipping virtual water in the form of biofuels.