Dozens of Utah towns buy cheap federal hydropower off the Colorado River. Whether they keep buying it at the price they pay now turns on a reservoir number that fell again this month, and is forecast to keep falling into the fall.
Lake Powell is at 24 percent of capacity. The figure comes from the Natural Resources Conservation Service's June 1 Water Supply Outlook for Utah, included in the Utah Division of Water Resources' June 11 drought update. Only the mid to late 1960s have a lower June 1 reading on record, and back then, the reservoir was still filling behind a dam that had just been poured.
The power comes from eight generators at the toe of Glen Canyon Dam. Together, they carry a capacity of 1,320 megawatts, and the Bureau of Reclamation runs them as the largest single source in the Colorado River Storage Project. That federal system reaches nearly 5.8 million customers across seven Western states. The Western Area Power Administration markets the output and sells it at cost.
There is a hard floor under all of this. At an elevation of 3,490 feet, the reservoir can no longer push water through the penstocks, and the turbines stop. Reclamation calls that elevation the minimum power pool. Below it, water leaves through the river outlet works instead, and the dam makes no electricity at all.
The surface is not far above that floor, and the gap is closing. Reclamation's water operations page recorded an end-of-April elevation of 3,526.99 feet, with 5.62 million acre-feet in storage. That is about 37 feet of room. The agency's May 24-Month Study then projects the reservoir sliding down through the summer to about 3,510.85 feet by the end of September, which would leave the cushion closer to 21 feet.
The 3,490 floor is not the line managers actually defend. They aim higher. Under the operating rules, Reclamation cut releases over the winter to protect a target elevation of 3,525 feet, and it has said it will use every tool available to keep Powell from dropping below 3,500. The most probable forecast already has the reservoir slipping under 3,525 this spring, which is why the 3,500 mark, not the 3,490 floor, is the number to watch through the fall.
Reclamation moved to slow the decline. In an April news release the agency warned that without major intervention Lake Powell could fall below 3,490 feet as soon as August. It then cut Lake Powell's water-year 2026 release to Lake Mead from 7.48 million acre-feet to 6.0 million acre-feet, and began releasing between 660,000 and 1 million acre-feet from Flaming Gorge Reservoir between April 2026 and April 2027, water that flows down the Green River into Powell. Reclamation expects the two actions together to add roughly 54 feet to the reservoir, relative to leaving it alone, and to bring it to at least 3,500 feet by April 2027.
What those releases buy is time, not a recovery. The reservoir is not projected to climb this summer. In the most probable scenario, it keeps drifting down through 2026 and into early 2027, bottoming near 3,496 feet around March, about six feet above the point where the generators stop. The rebound does not arrive until spring 2027 runoff, which the same study expects to lift Powell back toward 3,540 feet by next June. The interventions are what hold the line in between.
The rules that govern how much water leaves Glen Canyon are themselves about to change. The 2007 Interim Guidelines that coordinate Powell and Mead expire at the end of 2026. Reclamation put out a draft environmental impact statement for the post-2026 guidelines in January and took public comment through March 2. In the same April release, it said that, absent a deal among the seven basin states, Interior is prepared to set post-2026 operations itself later this summer. That long process is separate from the routine 24-Month Study Reclamation, which is published every August and sets the release tier for the coming water year. Both raise the same question: how long can the dam generate before anyone has to talk about an emergency drawdown? The agency keeps the running record on its post-2026 operations page.
For Utah, the exposure is wholesale and specific. Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems is a political subdivision of the state that supplies power to community-owned utilities and acts as the single buyer of a firm Colorado River Storage Project allocation to member cities that take one. When the dam generates less, the shortfall gets replaced on the open market, and the market is most expensive in the months when Utah air conditioners run hardest.
For most utilities, the federal hydropower is a slice of a broader portfolio, not the backbone, and the slice varies from one member to the next.
The next marker comes in August, when Reclamation's 24-Month Study sets the release tier for the new water year. Until then, the reservoir keeps falling, the cushion above the generators keeps thinning, and the towns that buy Glen Canyon's power wait to see how much of it there will be.
