California electricity is generally cheap in the sense that you don't need to use much of it (the big metro areas with the most people have very mild climates). I imagine AC is important in a place like Tucson.

The fact that pumping water uphill is so expensive is why most of the water in the mountain west comes from the Rockies (where it flows down hill), though the exhaustion of the rocky mountain glaciers (due to global warming or whatever one believes is the reason) means that all that water built up over millions of years is coming to an end.