Powering Arizona’s Water: CAP’s Energy Needs
An aerial view of CAP’s canal at Salt Gila Pumping Plant, just south of the Salt River siphon.
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t 2.8 gigawatt-hours per year, the Central Arizona Project (CAP) is one of the biggest power users in the state of Arizona. Why? Mainly because of the immense power demands of diverting 1.6 million acre-feet of water a year off of Lake Havasu and immediately lifting it about 800 feet vertically. That is the first step in a process that ultimately brings water to CAP’s approximately 2 million agricultural, municipal, tribal, and industrial users. With the imminent closure of the coalfired Navajo Generating Station, CAP is identifying alternate sources of power to meet its considerable needs. In this interview, Darrin Francom, the director of operations, power, and engineering at CAP, speaks with Irrigation Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about the process of ensuring power flow to this important agency. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
12 | IRRIGATION LEADER
Darrin Francom: CAP’s mission is to move Arizona’s allotment of Colorado River water from the river itself into the three counties that we serve: Maricopa, Pinal, and Pima Counties. We do that through a series of aqueducts, pipelines, and pumping plants. There are 15 pumping plants, 336 miles of canal, and 1 pump storage reservoir. The canal is quite linear. We move water off the Colorado River, and if it is not needed immediately, we pump it into our storage reservoir, Lake Pleasant, and release it as our customers need it. That allows us to shift the timing of our deliveries and helps us shape our power usage. When power is costly, we can make deliveries from our reservoir instead of pumping water from the river. We target our main pumping for periods when power costs are lower, since power costs are a large component of our water rate. Our use of the storage reservoir means that our deliveries of water to our customers and our diversions of water from the Colorado River don’t have to match each other. Joshua Dill: How many customers do you have? Darrin Francom: CAP has more than 80 long-term water users, who fall into three groups: municipal/industrial users, agricultural users, and Native American tribes. We serve about 5 million people, which is 80 percent of the state’s population, since the three counties we serve contain the state’s largest cities, Phoenix and Tucson. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about the power demands of moving all that water.
PHOTO COURTESY OF CAP.
Darrin Francom: I’ve been at CAP for almost 18 years. Before that, I was an officer in the Navy Civil Engineer Corps. I was lucky enough to find a job at CAP as a civil engineer/project manager. I have been really lucky at CAP in that I’ve been able to move through a number of the different organizational pieces of our organization. I supervised our design engineering team and our project management team, moved on to be a manager within our centralized maintenance team, and then moved back into engineering as the manager of engineering. Most recently, I’ve taken on the role of director of operations, power, and engineering. I’d say my background is primarily in engineering, project management, and maintenance, and now I’ve taken on this fun role within our operations team and our power group.
Joshua Dill: Would you give us an overview of CAP and what it consists of?
