Hoover Dam Faces a 70% Cut in Generating Capacity as Lake Mead Nears 1,035 Feet

Lake Mead, the largest reservoir on the Colorado River, is expected to fall below an elevation of 1,035 feet above sea level within the next 12 months, possibly as early as late August, according to reporting by Circle of Blue published by Inside Climate News on June 12, 2026. At that level, generating capacity at Hoover Dam would be cut by 70%, because 12 of the dam's 17 turbines are not designed to operate in such low-water conditions.

"We're going to go to 1,035," Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, said at a meeting in mid-May. Mead stood at about 1,050 feet in early June and had been dropping roughly one foot every five days, according to the report. The decline follows record-low winter runoff into reservoirs that were already depleted after more than two decades of drought in the Colorado River basin. Reclamation announced on May 21 that it will spend $52 million on three new wide-head turbines able to generate power down to an elevation of 950 feet.

Hoover's electricity is sold under contracts to utilities and public power agencies in Arizona, California and Nevada. Lincoln County Power District in eastern Nevada, which serves about 5,000 people, gets about 70% of its electricity from Hoover. Hydropower is valuable to the grid not only for its energy but for its ability to ramp up and down quickly. The Western Electricity Coordinating Council, which assesses reliability in the western interconnection, is working with researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the National Laboratory of the Rockies to model how the grid would respond to a large loss of Hoover capacity under different weather and demand scenarios, according to WECC's Katie Rogers.

The Colorado River supplies water to about 40 million people and irrigates large areas of farmland in seven US states and Mexico. Fuentes said that, absent changes in hydrology, hydropower in both the upper and lower basins is "absolutely in trouble and directly related to drought."