Peter Lake, Member, Texas Water Development Board
Follow Peter @twdb_peter
Conservation. A proven water management strategy to reduce everyday water consumption or increase water use efficiency, allowing more to be done with the same amount of water. Given our state’s propensity to drought, Texans are no strangers to water conservation efforts. Communities across the state are seeing real results from conservation projects and are eager to implement them—so much so, that conservation is by far the most frequently recommended strategy in the 2017 State Water Plan to ensure an adequate future water supply.
Approved in May by the Texas Water Development Board (TWDB), the 2017 State Water Plan was built on 16 regional water plans developed by regional water planning groups throughout the state. During a five-year planning period, each planning group evaluates existing water supplies in comparison to water demand projections and population projections in order to recommend water management strategies that would address potential water shortages under drought of record conditions in the next 50 years.
The state water plan tells us that the population in Texas is expected to increase 73 percent between 2020 and 2070. Along with this growth, water demand is projected to increase 17 percent during that time period. Yet our water supplies are decreasing, producing a potential total water shortage in a drought of 8.9 million acre-feet per year in 2070.
With the shared goal to increase Texans’ water supply, planning groups recommended approximately 5,500 water management strategies in the 2017 State Water Plan. Once implemented, the strategies are projected to meet nearly all potential municipal shortages, providing approximately 8.5 million acre-feet per year to water user groups in 2070. Conservation, in the form of water savings, makes up over one quarter, or 2.3 million acre-feet per year, of recommended strategy supplies in 2070.
Conservation strategies have been on the rise in recent state water plans, and communities throughout Texas are taking great strides to implement them. In the 2017 plan, conservation is a recommended strategy in all 16 regional water plans and associated with over half of the 2,600 water user groups. When demand management (long-term conservation and temporary drought management restrictions) is combined with reuse, the two make up nearly half (45 percent) of total strategy volumes in the 2017 State Water Plan. This is an increase over the 2012 plan, in which conservation and reuse were 34 percent of strategy volumes.
Municipal conservation makes up 9.6 percent of total strategy types in 2070 and represents activities such as water system audits, water line repair and replacement, automatic metering systems, public education and outreach, and installation of low-flow plumbing features for residential and commercial use. Irrigation conservation makes up 15.7 percent of strategy types and includes irrigation canal lining, land leveling and reduced levee spacing (for rice in region H), conversion to Low Energy Precise Application (LEPA) systems, and change in crop variety or type. Water savings associated with steam-electric, manufacturing, and mining conservation activities (referred to as “other conservation”) make up approximately 2.4 percent of all strategy types.
If all recommended municipal conservation and reuse strategies are implemented in 2070, the projected statewide average municipal water use would decline significantly to approximately 124 gallons per capita per day. This is well below the total statewide municipal water use goal of 140 gallons per capita per day recommended by the Water Conservation Implementation Task Force —and would be the first state water plan to report meeting that goal within the planning horizon.
Like all strategies outlined in the 2017 State Water Plan and those of previous years, there are costs associated with implementing these conservation projects. Due to the inclusion of more capital-intensive conservation strategies outlined in the most recent plan, the cost to implement them is $4.4 billion—a steep increase of more than $3 billion over the 2012 plan.
Fortunately, the TWDB offers financial assistance programs to help communities implement their projects.
Conservation is the most affordable of many effective water management solutions to ensure we have enough water supplies for the future, and it’s one that Texans of all ages can support by being more conscientious about their water use. The TWDB offers a variety of
water conservation and education materials, including conservation
tips and brochures. Water is limited; save some today!
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Peter Lake was appointed to the Texas Water Development Board by Governor Greg Abbott in December 2015. A native of Tyler, Texas, Lake currently resides in Austin.
The Texas Water Development Board is the state agency that provides water planning, data collection and dissemination, financial assistance, and technical assistance services to the citizens of Texas.