LWS Presenting at AHS Symposium - Evaluating Well Sustainability in an Extremely Developed Groundwater Basin
Bruce Lytle is providing a technical session on modeling at the 33rd Annual Arizona Hydrological Society Symposium, on Thursday, September 16. The presentation, titled “Evaluating Well Sustainability in an Extensively Developed Groundwater Basin,” will be given in the technical session on Modeling. Ms Adrienne Soder, Senior Hydrologist with Arizona Public Service (APS), is the co-author/presenter.
APS’ Sundance power plant, in Pinal County, is an important resource on the APS power grid, serving the southern sector of Arizona. While the power plant uses senior Central Arizona Project (CAP) water rights leased from the Gila River Indian Community, on-site groundwater wells serve a vital role in maintaining power production in that they allow the plant’s blowdown water to not only be disposed, but put it to beneficial use through irrigation mixing.
In this way, APS is minimizing groundwater use while providing a vital power resource. For these reasons, it is very important that the groundwater resources being used by APS remain a sustainable resource. To evaluate the sustainability of the APS wells, a numerical MODFLOW model was developed from the regional Pinal Active Management Area model developed by the Arizona Department of Water Resources. The primary assumption in the Sundance model is that it assumed that, due to ongoing drought conditions in the Colorado River Basin, groundwater production will increase in the future if CAP water supplies are reduced within Pinal County. Therefore, a worst-case scenario has been evaluated to assess sustainability because these groundwater wells are so important to Sundance’s power generation potential. The presentation will provide the results of the numerical modeling study.
We hope to see you at our presentation!
