While much of the West and Southwest remain locked in an extended drought and water levels at Lake Mead, the nation’s largest freshwater reservoir, remain low, Las Vegas casinos have become exceptionally water-friendly.
When federal lawmakers divvied up water resources from the Colorado River system and eventually Lake Mead in the 1922 Colorado River Compact, Las Vegas received 2 percent of available allocations with California getting 27 percent and Arizona 18 percent, both of which mostly use the water for agriculture.
At the time, Las Vegas was much smaller and still had available freshwater springs that since have dried up as the area’s population exploded to the more than 2 million living there now.
During the casino building frenzy of the 1990s and 2000s, casino developers and operators placed an emphasis on water conservancy and environmental sustainability to reduce costs and remain sustainable environmentally, even while building much larger casinos, hotels, and convention centers.
Various water reclamation and conservation efforts implemented by casinos over the years have resulted in casinos using only 7.6 percent of the entire amount of water consumed in southern Nevada each day, Motley Fool reported. By contrast, Las Vegas homeowners account for 60 percent of the area’s total water usage.
While Las Vegas casinos have reduced their water use and costs, they also are looking to reduce their energy costs, but the state’s utility won’t let them without paying up, first.
Wynn Resorts, Las Vegas Sands, and MGM Resorts International own and operate more than a dozen of the biggest and most popular casinos in Las Vegas and want to use more affordable alternative energies. But they say utility NV Energy wants so much money for them to leave that it is not feasible.
NV Energy, owned by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, wants several years’ worth of utilities paid in advance for the casino chains to go off the grid and use more affordable alternative energy sources, such as solar power.
NV Energy is demanding more than $130 million in combined payments for the three casino empires to go off the grid and pursue their own energy sources. The money, the utility claims, would offset costs that its remaining customers would have to absorb, most of whom are residential customers.
The three casino firms account for about 5 percent of the utility’s total electricity sales and pay up to 10 cents per kilowatt hour, which they could obtain for as little as 3.5 cents per kilowatt hour from renewable energy providers, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Wynn Resorts estimates it could reduce its annual power costs by 40 percent, $7 million, if allowed to pursue its own energy sources, and Las Vegas Sands needs to buy more renewable energy to reduce its energy use and meet goals for environmentally sustainable operations, the Wall Street Journal reported.
In addition to paying a combined $130 million, the casinos need permission from the Nevada Public Utilities Commission to leave the utility, and the commission never has granted such a request.
