How the drought boosts your utility bills, and global warming

By starving California’s hydroelectric dams of water, the state’s four-year drought has cost consumers an extra $2 billion in utility bills and pushed up greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by 10 percent, a new study finds.

Utilities had to buy more expensive replacement electricity from power plants burning natural gas.

“When we generate less hydroelectricity, we have to do something else — and in California, that something else is burning more natural gas,” said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute and author of the study.

While California has been rapidly adding solar and wind facilities, the lack of steady and predictable hydropower forced utilities to buy more electricity from more traditional power plants, most fueled by natural gas.

Plants produced not only more carbon dioxide, the main culprit behind global warming, but smog-causing pollutants as well.

[...] they rose again in 2012, as the drought cut hydropower production and faulty equipment closed the San Onofre nuclear power plant near San Diego.

California’s overall greenhouse gas emissions fell again in 2013, the most recent year for which data are available.