13 ms·

Decision looms for controversial Poseidon desalination plant

35 points by perihelions 5y ago

jmyeet 5y ago
Let me put this in a different perspective: California still gets significant water from snowmelt every year from the Sierra Nevadas. A huge portion of this water is diverted to agriculture. A lot of these places couldn't survive as farms without significant external water like this. So here's my question: why are we considering making consumers pay for expensive desalinated drinking water instead of diverting snowmelt to drinking water? What we're effectively doing is using expensive desalination for agriculture and making consumers pay for it. And before anyone says "we need food" well... yes and no. Different types of food require different amounts of water. A decade ago California farmers were exporting almonds and alfalfa to China. Why? Both are water-intensive crops (eg almonds require ~1 gallon of water each; for reference a person only needs 0.5 gallons a day). Not one mention of agriculture or snow in this article.
- rektide 5y ago
  The United States made a lot of vast vast vast promises to farmers ~100 years ago they could have oodles of free water in perpetuity & the legal system believes there is no way to ever take back these rights short of paying these users-of-natural-rights dump truck loads of money forever to stop. (other posters call this calamity by it's legal name, "water rights".)
  - rektide 5y ago
    *users-of-natural-resources, oops
  - DubiousPusher 5y ago
    The devil collects on his end of the Faustian Bargain that was manifest destiny. The American system turns out to be a system for making convenient choices and not wise ones.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  > why are we considering making consumers pay for expensive desalinated drinking water instead of diverting snowmelt to drinking water? Water rights are a thing. In order to divert that water, it would essentially be eminent domain, and you'd have to compensate farmers. It wouldn't just be the dollar amount for wholesale water, it'd be what it does to the value of the land, too. You could see farmland go from $30,000 per acre to $5,000. There are also second-order economic effects. It could cause a dust bowl-like recession in the central valley. And then you run into all the other crops that are grown there. Expect peaches and melons to double in price.
  - coryrc 5y ago
    Let's just bite the bullet, end the water rights system and auction the water, using the money to pay back the cost. The thing is, peaches, melons, etc aren't going to double in price. Just stop growing alfala: https://ucmanagedrought.ucdavis.edu/Agriculture/Crop_Irrigation_Strategies/Alfalfa/ https://ucmanagedrought.ucdavis.edu/Agriculture/Crop_Irrigat... It's worth little but it's "the largest agricultural user in California" because their water is free.
    - jeffbee 5y ago
      That seems crazy. If people are going to be putting in orchards and vineyards you don't want to wreck their investments by exposing them to a pure highest-bidder free market for water. There is good reason to have state-level planning and intervention for water and food. It just happens that our existing interventions - that a handful of 20th century crooks are guaranteed water at $5/acre foot not adjusted for inflation, forever - are extremely poor examples of such interventions.
      - DubiousPusher 5y ago
        Obviously you would auction water leases for terms long enough to ensure the intended economic activity remained viable. It's actually pretty wise IMO. And despite the other poster's straw manning here, I think something similar should be done with land and mineral rights.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Throwawayaerlei 5y ago
  The US West's water allocation policies are based on history, often old compacts made between various interest groups. The big California water systems would have never gotten off the ground back then without the farmers being part of it, the problem is that starting in the 1960s new water projects were canceled on a bipartisan basis while the urban population continued to skyrocket. You try to change this system and you'll open a _huge_ can of worms for all of the US west of the Minnesota to Louisiana border, the legal fights would consume the relevant courts for decades. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_law_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_law_in_the_United_States and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_right for a start.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    something gotta give and its nit going to be laes of nature, so when are we gonna byte the bullet and fix laes of men? Hetting worse with clumate change
    - Throwawayaerlei 5y ago
      The laws of nature say "you need a water system so big to support X population" with California's regular cycle of wet periods and droughts. What "gave" was political will to either continue building out the system or limiting the size of the population fed by the system. This is just one of many examples where a "can was kicked down the road" for future politicians and the people they rule over to deal with, this mess was made certain in the 1960s. The unfalsifiable concept of climate change has nothing to do with it, except that the climate cycles were well known long ago. More recently it's been discovered this is at least partly linked to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_Oscillation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_... "During El Niño events, increased precipitation is expected in California due to a more southerly, zonal, storm track. During La Niña, increased precipitation is diverted into the Pacific Northwest due to a more northerly storm track." We realized El Niño was a thing no later than the 19th Century, and per a Wikipedia skim evidence has been found for the cycle going back at least 10,000 years.
  - 5y ago
- skybrian 5y ago
  Yes, cities can always outbid farmers if their water were for sale, but often it isn't. Water rights are complicated. Also, farmers are already not getting any state water. Guess who has to cut back next? From a disaster planning standpoint, having a water source that doesn't depend on rain or snowfall is important for reducing risk. Cities can afford this and it's worth doing because they don't have the option of not planting in a dry year. (Also, if you care about housing, the lack of water is sometimes used to oppose new projects.) San Diego is doing a lot better than LA in part due to their desalination plant.
- alimov 5y ago
  > “…(eg almonds require ~1 gallon of water each;” This always blows my mind (when I think about it). Driving through that region of CA is really jarring because you can see all the ag work being done in the middle of the desert.. I’ve made the drive between LA and Seattle a number of times and I’m always shocked to see fruits and nuts being grown in such a counterintuitive location. I don’t know much of anything about optimal/suboptimal locations for growing these things, but it sure doesn’t seem like a great use of water. I wonder how much water is wasted just due to the climate in the area.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    If this subject is terribly interesting to you, I recommend the book The Dreamt Land. https://www.amazon.com/Dreamt-Land-Chasing-Across-California-ebook/dp/B07GD4N31V https://www.amazon.com/Dreamt-Land-Chasing-Across-California...
    - alimov 5y ago
      Added to my reading list, thank you. The reviews really sell the author and his style of writing.
      - BellLabradors 5y ago
        Also Cadillac Desert: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56140.Cadillac_Desert https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56140.Cadillac_Desert
- tzs 5y ago
  That gallon of water used to grow an almond doesn’t actually end up in the almond.
  - jmyeet 5y ago
    That half gallon of water the human consumes every day doesn’t end up in the human either. What’s your point?
    - tzs 5y ago
      You specifically mentioned almond exports in the context of water supply management. My point is that exports are irrelevant in that context because only a tiny bit of the water used to grow it ends up in the almond. To determine the impact of almond growing on the water supply you have to follow the water, not the almond, and see where it goes. 99.97% of that water ends up somewhere other than the almond. The net water impact of growing almonds depends greatly on how much of that 99.97% ends up someplace useful.
- bsder 5y ago
  > So here's my question: why are we considering making consumers pay for expensive desalinated drinking water instead of diverting snowmelt to drinking water? What we're effectively doing is using expensive desalination for agriculture and making consumers pay for it. Because the correct answer--"Shut down agribusiness in the Central Valley"--is politically infeasible. So, we will continue on this path until the aquifers are completely pumped out by the big agribusinesses who will then abandon the Central Valley to its collapse.
- oofbey 5y ago
  > a person only needs 0.5 gallons a day This is simply wrong, by a lot. Americans use about 100 gallons/day of water per person on average, including things like toilets, showers, etc. Maybe we don’t “need” to use that much (whatever “need” is supposed to mean) but it’s the way people live, which is not going to change any time soon. Even just considering drinking this is wrong. Adult men should drink close to a gallon a day, women somewhat less.
  - axiolite 5y ago
    > Maybe we don’t “need” to use that much (whatever “need” is supposed to mean) He's talking minimal human survival. Though that depends on temperatures, body weight and activity level: http://www.aircav.net/survival/asch13/fig13-2.gif http://www.aircav.net/survival/asch13/fig13-2.gif https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f2/e1/22/f2e122972c93b1f2a67e45d76c9fdbdd.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f2/e1/22/f2e122972c93b1f2a67e...
    - oofbey 5y ago
      Which is a completely pointless reference when discussing municipal water supplies.
      - NoahKAndrews 5y ago
        The point being made is that a single almond requires more water than a human. Not that modern humans don't use much water in their day-to-day lives.
        dr_dshiv 5y ago
        Yeah, but then that isn’t factual either. The almond doesn’t need the water, the almond tree does (and we divide that by the number of almonds produced). Similarly, we would want to compare how much water a state uses, divided by the people. Both the almond and the person don’t take that much water, but as part of a larger necessary system, they do.
- vondur 5y ago
  California is a great place to grow fruits and vegetables. Very stable weather and long growing seasons. Of course the issue is the lack of water. California provides a large amount of produce for the entire country.
- variant 5y ago
  Tons of the water is used for fish too. Agriculture does seem kind of important...
NegativeLatency 5y ago
Related, for anyone who hasn’t read it Cadillac Desert is a fascinating read about water in the west. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert
Kyragem 5y ago
and every year we have less and less snow on our sierras so don't bank on this.
jeffbee 5y ago
When I ran the numbers on having 100 million urban Californians, large-scale desalination seemed like a no-brainer. It really does not cost all that much and it can be entirely powered during daytime solar energy surpluses, since intermittent water production is no problem at all. If there is some equity-justice-words objection that is easily covered by a universal basic rebate. Nobody should be using more than about 50 gallons/person/day anyway. Utility-scale drinking water costs a fraction of a penny. Even the punitive rates being charged for wastefulness during the drought, which only kick in at a ridiculous 1600 gallons/day, is only 0.7¢/gal. There's no reason that desalinated water at utility scales should add more than $5/month to a household expenses and to the extent that is a problem, just subsidize it with a free first 3000 gallons per month per meter or whatever. California environmentalism has been finely crafted by its boomer/hippie inventors as a way to stop everything, but that needs to shift into a mindset of building the large-scale projects we are going to need to face climate change: a huge amount of solar and wind, numerous desalination stations, many storage projects since we are losing the snowpack, etc.
- pstuart 5y ago
  This can be further augmented by rethinking water capture to replenish aquifers, e.g., https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-rainwater-lost-wet-winter-california-20190220-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-rainwater-lost-wet...
bolangi 5y ago
Historically desalinization has been an extremely inefficient way to produce drinking water -- energy intensive while discharing a large fraction of the input water. I doubt the fundamental economics of desalinization have changed.
- icegreentea2 5y ago
  The cost estimates (at the end customer) are all right there in the article. $5 of month on the top side, and estimated to be something like 3x the price of importing drinking water.
  - Gibbon1 5y ago
    I once found a table that lasted the energy requirements for Los Angeles water sources. A lot of sources have minimal energy needs. But something like 10% require about 50% of the energy needed for desalinization. There is a lot of inane nimby stuff mixed in with reasonable concerns. For instance owners of hobby horse ranches in the San Gabriels suing to stop the California's high speed rail's plans to run a tunnel 1000+ feet under their property. Opposition to desalinization is like that.
- Fatnino 5y ago
  We should be running desal on the salt ponds in San Francisco Bay. The water currently being intentionally lost to evaporation will instead be captured and the salt will be extracted faster. Seems like a win win.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
CaptainBanger 5y ago
gedy 5y ago
> Concerns included flood risks based on updated projections of sea-level rise, the location in an industrial area “with a history of contamination problems” and higher costs for water that would probably mean “significant burdens” for low-income communities, which they said would raise environmental justice issues. Please. The objections are largely the usual NIMBY types and concerns.
google234123 5y ago
Farms in California already get a disproportionate and growing amount of water. How about they do better?
chrisbrandow 5y ago
I’m sure I’m naive, but (eventual) cheap solar plus desalination seems like a great way supplement the obvious water shortfalls headed our way. I find the opposition to be shortsighted. I feel like we are rapidly approaching the point where we should be beginning the work on the last resorts while also continuing to work on the other options like recycling, etc. Especially given today’s article in latimes about parts of socal requiring max of 85 gallons daily. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-04-30/can-you-get-by-on-just-80-gallons-of-water-a-day https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-04-30/can-you-...
- AndrewDucker 5y ago
  The problem with desalination is that you don't extract all of the water, you extract half of it, leaving a bunch of very salty water to be dumped back into the ocean, causing dead zones.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Piping the brine farther out to sea, with leaky pipe, mitigates that. A better solution is direct solar thermal desalination, and flushing at night. Brine might also be drained to the Salton Sea.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Until all of fossil fuel demand is displaced, solar will not be cheap enough for desalination. After that point, it will be reasonable, but we are years away from that. We should make farmers not hosting dual-use solar on their fields subsidize farmers who do. (Dual-use generates power, and also increased ag yield, reduced water loss, and more PV efficiency.)
closedloop129 5y ago
To my surprise the cost of desalination is quite low. It's nowhere near the price of bottled water. $2,710 per acre-foot is $2 per cubic meter or $0,01 per gallon. But it's not profitable for regular crops: Crops need about 700mm of water [1], so 0.7m, which is $1.4 per square meter. Maize/corn can be sold for $0.13 per square meter [2]. However, other crops like lavender can be sold for $5 per square meter. The price of desalination must be energy bound. Does this mean that in coastal deserts, when renewable energy brings energy prices down to 1/10, it starts being profitable to grow regular crops with desalinated water? [1] http://agropedia.iitk.ac.in/content/water-requirement-different-crops http://agropedia.iitk.ac.in/content/water-requirement-differ... [2] https://entrepreneur-360.com/most-profitable-crops-9945 https://entrepreneur-360.com/most-profitable-crops-9945
- credit_guy 5y ago
  CAPEX for desal plants is not negligible. The San Diego plant cost $1 BN for a daily output of 50 mil gallons. If you intend to amortize the plant in 20 years, it comes at 0.27 cents/galon. So even if you get free energy, you are far from your target of 0.1 cents per gallon. By the way, thanks for running the numbers. I checked them, amd they are correct, with the small observation that recently the pricd of corn has gone up more than twice.
  - mrep 5y ago
    You are off my 2 orders of magnitude: $1,000,000,000 / (50,000,000 gallons * 365 days per year * 20 years) = $0.00273972602 per gallon.
    - credit_guy 5y ago
      $0.0027 is the same as 0.27 cents.
      - mrep 5y ago
        Ah, my mistake, not used to reading multiple fractions used together.

35 points by perihelions 5y ago

Let me put this in a different perspective: California still gets significant water from snowmelt every year from the Sierra Nevadas. A huge portion of this water is diverted to agriculture. A lot of these places couldn't survive as farms without significant external water like this. So here's my question: why are we considering making consumers pay for expensive desalinated drinking water instead of diverting snowmelt to drinking water? What we're effectively doing is using expensive desalination for agriculture and making consumers pay for it. And before anyone says "we need food" well... yes and no. Different types of food require different amounts of water. A decade ago California farmers were exporting almonds and alfalfa to China. Why? Both are water-intensive crops (eg almonds require ~1 gallon of water each; for reference a person only needs 0.5 gallons a day). Not one mention of agriculture or snow in this article.

rektide 5y ago
The United States made a lot of vast vast vast promises to farmers ~100 years ago they could have oodles of free water in perpetuity & the legal system believes there is no way to ever take back these rights short of paying these users-of-natural-rights dump truck loads of money forever to stop. (other posters call this calamity by it's legal name, "water rights".)
- rektide 5y ago
  *users-of-natural-resources, oops
- DubiousPusher 5y ago
  The devil collects on his end of the Faustian Bargain that was manifest destiny. The American system turns out to be a system for making convenient choices and not wise ones.
dehrmann 5y ago
> why are we considering making consumers pay for expensive desalinated drinking water instead of diverting snowmelt to drinking water? Water rights are a thing. In order to divert that water, it would essentially be eminent domain, and you'd have to compensate farmers. It wouldn't just be the dollar amount for wholesale water, it'd be what it does to the value of the land, too. You could see farmland go from $30,000 per acre to $5,000. There are also second-order economic effects. It could cause a dust bowl-like recession in the central valley. And then you run into all the other crops that are grown there. Expect peaches and melons to double in price.
- coryrc 5y ago
  Let's just bite the bullet, end the water rights system and auction the water, using the money to pay back the cost. The thing is, peaches, melons, etc aren't going to double in price. Just stop growing alfala: https://ucmanagedrought.ucdavis.edu/Agriculture/Crop_Irrigation_Strategies/Alfalfa/ https://ucmanagedrought.ucdavis.edu/Agriculture/Crop_Irrigat... It's worth little but it's "the largest agricultural user in California" because their water is free.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    That seems crazy. If people are going to be putting in orchards and vineyards you don't want to wreck their investments by exposing them to a pure highest-bidder free market for water. There is good reason to have state-level planning and intervention for water and food. It just happens that our existing interventions - that a handful of 20th century crooks are guaranteed water at $5/acre foot not adjusted for inflation, forever - are extremely poor examples of such interventions.
    - DubiousPusher 5y ago
      Obviously you would auction water leases for terms long enough to ensure the intended economic activity remained viable. It's actually pretty wise IMO. And despite the other poster's straw manning here, I think something similar should be done with land and mineral rights.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Throwawayaerlei 5y ago
The US West's water allocation policies are based on history, often old compacts made between various interest groups. The big California water systems would have never gotten off the ground back then without the farmers being part of it, the problem is that starting in the 1960s new water projects were canceled on a bipartisan basis while the urban population continued to skyrocket. You try to change this system and you'll open a _huge_ can of worms for all of the US west of the Minnesota to Louisiana border, the legal fights would consume the relevant courts for decades. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_law_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_law_in_the_United_States and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_right for a start.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  something gotta give and its nit going to be laes of nature, so when are we gonna byte the bullet and fix laes of men? Hetting worse with clumate change
  - Throwawayaerlei 5y ago
    The laws of nature say "you need a water system so big to support X population" with California's regular cycle of wet periods and droughts. What "gave" was political will to either continue building out the system or limiting the size of the population fed by the system. This is just one of many examples where a "can was kicked down the road" for future politicians and the people they rule over to deal with, this mess was made certain in the 1960s. The unfalsifiable concept of climate change has nothing to do with it, except that the climate cycles were well known long ago. More recently it's been discovered this is at least partly linked to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_Oscillation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_... "During El Niño events, increased precipitation is expected in California due to a more southerly, zonal, storm track. During La Niña, increased precipitation is diverted into the Pacific Northwest due to a more northerly storm track." We realized El Niño was a thing no later than the 19th Century, and per a Wikipedia skim evidence has been found for the cycle going back at least 10,000 years.
- 5y ago
skybrian 5y ago
Yes, cities can always outbid farmers if their water were for sale, but often it isn't. Water rights are complicated. Also, farmers are already not getting any state water. Guess who has to cut back next? From a disaster planning standpoint, having a water source that doesn't depend on rain or snowfall is important for reducing risk. Cities can afford this and it's worth doing because they don't have the option of not planting in a dry year. (Also, if you care about housing, the lack of water is sometimes used to oppose new projects.) San Diego is doing a lot better than LA in part due to their desalination plant.
alimov 5y ago
> “…(eg almonds require ~1 gallon of water each;” This always blows my mind (when I think about it). Driving through that region of CA is really jarring because you can see all the ag work being done in the middle of the desert.. I’ve made the drive between LA and Seattle a number of times and I’m always shocked to see fruits and nuts being grown in such a counterintuitive location. I don’t know much of anything about optimal/suboptimal locations for growing these things, but it sure doesn’t seem like a great use of water. I wonder how much water is wasted just due to the climate in the area.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  If this subject is terribly interesting to you, I recommend the book The Dreamt Land. https://www.amazon.com/Dreamt-Land-Chasing-Across-California-ebook/dp/B07GD4N31V https://www.amazon.com/Dreamt-Land-Chasing-Across-California...
  - alimov 5y ago
    Added to my reading list, thank you. The reviews really sell the author and his style of writing.
    - BellLabradors 5y ago
      Also Cadillac Desert: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56140.Cadillac_Desert https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56140.Cadillac_Desert
tzs 5y ago
That gallon of water used to grow an almond doesn’t actually end up in the almond.
- jmyeet 5y ago
  That half gallon of water the human consumes every day doesn’t end up in the human either. What’s your point?
  - tzs 5y ago
    You specifically mentioned almond exports in the context of water supply management. My point is that exports are irrelevant in that context because only a tiny bit of the water used to grow it ends up in the almond. To determine the impact of almond growing on the water supply you have to follow the water, not the almond, and see where it goes. 99.97% of that water ends up somewhere other than the almond. The net water impact of growing almonds depends greatly on how much of that 99.97% ends up someplace useful.
bsder 5y ago
> So here's my question: why are we considering making consumers pay for expensive desalinated drinking water instead of diverting snowmelt to drinking water? What we're effectively doing is using expensive desalination for agriculture and making consumers pay for it. Because the correct answer--"Shut down agribusiness in the Central Valley"--is politically infeasible. So, we will continue on this path until the aquifers are completely pumped out by the big agribusinesses who will then abandon the Central Valley to its collapse.
oofbey 5y ago
> a person only needs 0.5 gallons a day This is simply wrong, by a lot. Americans use about 100 gallons/day of water per person on average, including things like toilets, showers, etc. Maybe we don’t “need” to use that much (whatever “need” is supposed to mean) but it’s the way people live, which is not going to change any time soon. Even just considering drinking this is wrong. Adult men should drink close to a gallon a day, women somewhat less.
- axiolite 5y ago
  > Maybe we don’t “need” to use that much (whatever “need” is supposed to mean) He's talking minimal human survival. Though that depends on temperatures, body weight and activity level: http://www.aircav.net/survival/asch13/fig13-2.gif http://www.aircav.net/survival/asch13/fig13-2.gif https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f2/e1/22/f2e122972c93b1f2a67e45d76c9fdbdd.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f2/e1/22/f2e122972c93b1f2a67e...
  - oofbey 5y ago
    Which is a completely pointless reference when discussing municipal water supplies.
    - NoahKAndrews 5y ago
      The point being made is that a single almond requires more water than a human. Not that modern humans don't use much water in their day-to-day lives.
      - dr_dshiv 5y ago
        Yeah, but then that isn’t factual either. The almond doesn’t need the water, the almond tree does (and we divide that by the number of almonds produced). Similarly, we would want to compare how much water a state uses, divided by the people. Both the almond and the person don’t take that much water, but as part of a larger necessary system, they do.
vondur 5y ago
California is a great place to grow fruits and vegetables. Very stable weather and long growing seasons. Of course the issue is the lack of water. California provides a large amount of produce for the entire country.
variant 5y ago
Tons of the water is used for fish too. Agriculture does seem kind of important...

NegativeLatency 5y ago

Related, for anyone who hasn’t read it Cadillac Desert is a fascinating read about water in the west. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert

Kyragem 5y ago

and every year we have less and less snow on our sierras so don't bank on this.

jeffbee 5y ago

When I ran the numbers on having 100 million urban Californians, large-scale desalination seemed like a no-brainer. It really does not cost all that much and it can be entirely powered during daytime solar energy surpluses, since intermittent water production is no problem at all. If there is some equity-justice-words objection that is easily covered by a universal basic rebate. Nobody should be using more than about 50 gallons/person/day anyway. Utility-scale drinking water costs a fraction of a penny. Even the punitive rates being charged for wastefulness during the drought, which only kick in at a ridiculous 1600 gallons/day, is only 0.7¢/gal. There's no reason that desalinated water at utility scales should add more than $5/month to a household expenses and to the extent that is a problem, just subsidize it with a free first 3000 gallons per month per meter or whatever. California environmentalism has been finely crafted by its boomer/hippie inventors as a way to stop everything, but that needs to shift into a mindset of building the large-scale projects we are going to need to face climate change: a huge amount of solar and wind, numerous desalination stations, many storage projects since we are losing the snowpack, etc.

pstuart 5y ago
This can be further augmented by rethinking water capture to replenish aquifers, e.g., https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-rainwater-lost-wet-winter-california-20190220-story.html https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-rainwater-lost-wet...

bolangi 5y ago

Historically desalinization has been an extremely inefficient way to produce drinking water -- energy intensive while discharing a large fraction of the input water. I doubt the fundamental economics of desalinization have changed.

icegreentea2 5y ago
The cost estimates (at the end customer) are all right there in the article. $5 of month on the top side, and estimated to be something like 3x the price of importing drinking water.
- Gibbon1 5y ago
  I once found a table that lasted the energy requirements for Los Angeles water sources. A lot of sources have minimal energy needs. But something like 10% require about 50% of the energy needed for desalinization. There is a lot of inane nimby stuff mixed in with reasonable concerns. For instance owners of hobby horse ranches in the San Gabriels suing to stop the California's high speed rail's plans to run a tunnel 1000+ feet under their property. Opposition to desalinization is like that.
Fatnino 5y ago
We should be running desal on the salt ponds in San Francisco Bay. The water currently being intentionally lost to evaporation will instead be captured and the salt will be extracted faster. Seems like a win win.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

CaptainBanger 5y ago

gedy 5y ago

> Concerns included flood risks based on updated projections of sea-level rise, the location in an industrial area “with a history of contamination problems” and higher costs for water that would probably mean “significant burdens” for low-income communities, which they said would raise environmental justice issues. Please. The objections are largely the usual NIMBY types and concerns.

google234123 5y ago

Farms in California already get a disproportionate and growing amount of water. How about they do better?

chrisbrandow 5y ago

I’m sure I’m naive, but (eventual) cheap solar plus desalination seems like a great way supplement the obvious water shortfalls headed our way. I find the opposition to be shortsighted. I feel like we are rapidly approaching the point where we should be beginning the work on the last resorts while also continuing to work on the other options like recycling, etc. Especially given today’s article in latimes about parts of socal requiring max of 85 gallons daily. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-04-30/can-you-get-by-on-just-80-gallons-of-water-a-day https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-04-30/can-you-...

AndrewDucker 5y ago
The problem with desalination is that you don't extract all of the water, you extract half of it, leaving a bunch of very salty water to be dumped back into the ocean, causing dead zones.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Piping the brine farther out to sea, with leaky pipe, mitigates that. A better solution is direct solar thermal desalination, and flushing at night. Brine might also be drained to the Salton Sea.
ncmncm 5y ago
Until all of fossil fuel demand is displaced, solar will not be cheap enough for desalination. After that point, it will be reasonable, but we are years away from that. We should make farmers not hosting dual-use solar on their fields subsidize farmers who do. (Dual-use generates power, and also increased ag yield, reduced water loss, and more PV efficiency.)

closedloop129 5y ago

To my surprise the cost of desalination is quite low. It's nowhere near the price of bottled water. $2,710 per acre-foot is $2 per cubic meter or $0,01 per gallon. But it's not profitable for regular crops: Crops need about 700mm of water [1], so 0.7m, which is $1.4 per square meter. Maize/corn can be sold for $0.13 per square meter [2]. However, other crops like lavender can be sold for $5 per square meter. The price of desalination must be energy bound. Does this mean that in coastal deserts, when renewable energy brings energy prices down to 1/10, it starts being profitable to grow regular crops with desalinated water? [1] http://agropedia.iitk.ac.in/content/water-requirement-different-crops http://agropedia.iitk.ac.in/content/water-requirement-differ... [2] https://entrepreneur-360.com/most-profitable-crops-9945 https://entrepreneur-360.com/most-profitable-crops-9945

credit_guy 5y ago
CAPEX for desal plants is not negligible. The San Diego plant cost $1 BN for a daily output of 50 mil gallons. If you intend to amortize the plant in 20 years, it comes at 0.27 cents/galon. So even if you get free energy, you are far from your target of 0.1 cents per gallon. By the way, thanks for running the numbers. I checked them, amd they are correct, with the small observation that recently the pricd of corn has gone up more than twice.
- mrep 5y ago
  You are off my 2 orders of magnitude: $1,000,000,000 / (50,000,000 gallons * 365 days per year * 20 years) = $0.00273972602 per gallon.
  - credit_guy 5y ago
    $0.0027 is the same as 0.27 cents.
    - mrep 5y ago
      Ah, my mistake, not used to reading multiple fractions used together.