Water security as an underwriting variable, not a permitting formality
Reservoir yield and watershed condition are as material to a project's viability as interconnection queue position, and are diligenced with a fraction of the rigor.
April 2025
Competing agricultural, municipal, and industrial demand on a shared watershed can turn a fully permitted project into a stranded asset years after financial close, and the failure mode rarely shows up in a standard environmental review. We now run water security as a standing line in the systemic diagnosis phase, quantifying seasonal yield variability and upstream demand growth on the same footing as grid capacity and land tenure.
The projects that hold up over a twenty-year horizon are the ones where water was treated as a constraint to design around from the first site screen, not a risk to disclose after the fact.
