Tehran, Iran Latest Big City On Verge Of Running Out Of Water In Drought

Iran is enduring a severe drought and some areas
including Tehran, population nearly 10 million
could run out of water. 

 Millions of people in Iran, including the capitol Tehran, are faced with the prospect of running out of water soon due to an extreme drought.  

According to the BBC

"Iran - especially its capital, Tehran - is facing an unprecedented drought this autumn, with rainfall at record lows and reservoirs nearly empty. Officials are pleading with citizens to conserve water as the crisis deepens."

President Masoud Pezeshkian has warned that if there is not enough rainfall soon, Tehran's water supply could be rationed. But he said that even rationing might not be enough to prevent a disaster."

BBC again:

"Iran's energy minister, Abbas Ali Abed, has warned the situation could soon force authorities to cut water supplies. 'Some nights we might decrease the water flow to zero,' he said."

Of course, the logistics of evacuating Tehran is a bit much. The city has about 9.8 million people. So where would they go?

Here's how bad it is:

Latian Dam, one of Tehran's main water sources, is down to 10 percent of its capacity. Another reservoir, Karaj Dam, which sends water to both Tehran and Alborz provinces is just as bad. 

The Karaj Dam at last report was holding just eight percent of capacity, and that is "dead water" meaning it can't be used for public consumption. 

Some residents say on many days they find their taps dry already.   NBC News describes one man,, Irfan Ensani, 39, returning home from work at one of his two jobs to find no water in the house. 

"We didn't have water for three days. The pressure was so low that nothing came out," he said.

Iran has been in drought for six years. Climate change is probably exacerbating the dry conditions. Especially since summers recently have brought record high temperatures, which accelerates evaporation. 

Temperatures rose to as high as 122 degrees in Iran last summer. The heat led to power outages even as reservoirs were going dry.  Rain is supposed to pick up in the autumn in Iran, but this fall there has been the driest in 50 years. 

Iran's tall mountains aren't helping, either. There's practically no snow up there. Intellinews.com reports: 

"According to the newly released statistics, the volume of snow recorded across the country is 98.6% lower than the same period in 2024 and 99.8% below the 120-year average -figures the experts describe as 'unprecedented decline.'" 

The so-called rainy season began earlier this month, and there was very little rain until the last couple of days. Despite the drought,  rain was heavy enough Monday to cause flooding in some western parts of Iran. It's too soon to tell whether that heavy rain will help ease the drought crisis. 

The Iranian government also resorted to cloud seeding in recent days in an effort to coax rain from any cloud that appeared in the skies.  

Climate change might have had a hand in this drought, but the government of Iran is very much to blame, as NBC and other news outlets point out. 

As NBC reports:

"The prolonged drought along with  years of overconsumption, an inefficient agricultural sector and mismanagement - including decades building mega-dams of questionable utility - have led to the problem, analysts say."

Ali Nazemi, an associate professor at Concordia University in Montreal was among a group of researchers who in 2021 warned Iran about its water use.

The warning was in a 2021 peer-reviewed study in the journal Scientific Reports.  The research was said Iran was overdrawing groundwater in four-fifths of Iran. This was causing Iran's land to sink, and its soil was getting more salty, and its salt lakes were disappearing. 

The paper said that the brewing crisis had the potential for "irreversible impacts on land and environment, threatening country's water, food, social-economic security." 

The study used publicly available data for Iran's Ministry of Energy to assess the nation's groundwater situation. "After the paper was published, they took the data sets out of public access, "Nazemi said.

The drought should not have come as a surprise to the Iranian government, either. Iranian media reported in 2021 that the World Meteorological Organization was predicting much drier and hotter conditions in Iran for the following five years.  

So, the government is just burying its head in the sand. At least there's plenty of sand to do the with Iran, I suppose.

Unrest has also contributed to the water shortage. Unrest is probably also going to be a result of Iran's dry taps. 

Ali Abadi also blamed part of the water crisis on Iran's 12-day war with Israel. Videos after an Israeli strike on a northern Tehran neighborhood showed flooding, suggesting water infrastructure could have been damaged enough to drain reservoirs more, the BBC reported.

Tempers are rising among Iran's citizens, too, raising fears of civil unrest. Students at Tehran's Al-Zahra University have already protested against the water shortages. And there was some violence over water in Iran's Khuzestan province. 

If things continue to get worse, the unrest could spiral way out of control. 

Tehran is the latest big city to almost completely run out of water. 

Cape Town, South Africa nearly ran out of water in 2018. Sao Paulo, Brazil almost went completely dry in 2014. 

Climate change is likely increasing the severity of droughts. I imagine we'll see more cities run out of water in the coming years. If such crises are mismanaged like Iran's has been, these dry taps could lead to many, many deaths. Either through lack of water or violence caused by that lack of water. 

 

Biden, Electrical Transformers, Climate Change, Demand, And Supplies Make For Complicated Mess

The Biden administration proposed
new rules to improve efficiency
of electrical transformers. Aim
was to help combat climate change.
Like most things, though, it got
complicated.

The Biden administration wanted new rules raising the energy efficiency standards for electric transformers. 

You know, those are the hoodickeys attached to a lot of power poles until they blow up in a dramatic flash during a storm or lightning strike, and shutting down the power to our homes

Problem was, in a small piece of a multi-pronged effort to combat climate change, the new transformer rules might have unintentionally done the opposite.  This is a relatively small episode, but in the grand scheme of things, it shows how efforts to confront climate change end up being a lot more complicated than you'd think.  

 Here's the set-up, as HuffPost describes it: 

Transformers are basically the connective tissue of power systems. 

Demand for electrical transformers is high. More development and sprawl is driving part of the demand. Climate change is also driving the market for these devices. People use more electricity on hot or smoky days to run air conditions and air purifiers. 

Climate change is also creating more frequent and intense  storms that make transformers go kablooey when strong winds rip at them or make trees and debris fall on them. Wildfires can also take out a bunch of transformers all at once. 

A third way climate change is creating booming demand for transformers is we're being encouraged to go electric to combat climate change. You need a bigger electrical grid, including plenty of transformers, along with the power lines and generation to feed all those EV plug ins. 

The problem, or potential problem, was that factories would need to use a different kind of steel and buy new equipment for the new rules set to take effect in 2027.  That risked creating a shortage of transformers when demand for them was already sky high. 

So the Biden people backed down. Sure, the rules would have helped an eensy, teensy bit in improving energy efficiency, which is definitely a goal if we want to reduce fossil fuel emissions. 

But a shortage of transformers might have stunted our transition away from fossil fuels toward clean energy.  You need transformers to ferry generated electricity from all those wind whirligigs and solar power stations out there to the outlet you plug your EV into. Or whatever.  

The rules have been dialed back after pressure from a wide variety of stakeholders, not the least of it were transformer manufacturers. 

A requirement for a special form of steel that would have been required in new transformers has been scrapped. That "special steel" would have forced transformer manufacturers to spend millions on new equipment that might end up becoming obsolete a few to several years later. 

Still some new energy efficiency regulations involving transformers are still scheduled to go into effect in five years.

HuffPost again:

"....the new standards still ratchet up efficiency of new transformers by enough to shave what the Energy Department estimated would be $14 billion off utility bills over the next 30 years, slashing nearly 85 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution - equal to the annual emissions of 11 million American homes - during the same period. 

The agency estimated the original proposal would have avoided 340 million metric tons of carbon pollution."

Regulators and presidential administrations seem to be constantly threading the needle between what environmentalists want and what industry wants. 

Environmentalists aren't happy with the transformer energy efficiency rules being watered down some. 

There's obviously a sense of urgency when it comes to combating climate change. It's also easy to get in the weeds when you do try to do something. 

This transformer kerfuffle is just one small example among many. 

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