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I’m not convinced that bashing the “A-listers” is productive. Urban water shortages can, with a bit of political will, be addressed by money. It seems to me

by amluto 4y ago

I’m not convinced that bashing the “A-listers” is productive. Urban water shortages can, with a bit of political will, be addressed by money. It seems to me that allowing people to buy large amounts of water at an appropriate price is just fine and maybe even a good idea. (Even at egregious CA private utility electricity rates, the energy needed to desalinate water is rather less expensive than the cost of residential water. Other technologies are less expensive. There is no water shortage per se, at least for residential use — there is a shortage of water available with current infrastructure.)

TheRealPomax 4y ago
Buy large amounts of water from where? California has none to buy, that's kind of what "the largest drought in recorded history" means. The problem is over-consumption of water, not "people not paying their fair share for the water they do use"; there's no budget deficit, there's a water deficit. And when the problem is folks wasting water, the solution is to stop giving them unfettered access to this critical resource. They still get enough water to live off of, but nothing more.
- amluto 4y ago
  One can buy out farm water rights and use them for residential use. Or one can buy machinery and electricity to turn sewage into tasty potable water or turn the Pacific Ocean into tasty drinking water. The Pacific Ocean is a functionally unlimited supply — it just has the solvable problem of having minerals dissolved in it.
  - Bud 4y ago
    Not solvable at scale right now. Especially with climate change impacts folded in—and remember, the whole reason we're in this mess is because of the climate change impacts we are already experiencing. Those are going to get a lot worse.
    - zbrozek 4y ago
      Why not? Our electric utilities complain about nonuniform load. Isn't a desalination plant an excellent variable load given that its product would get dumped into reservoirs? You could totally flatten the duck curve if you wanted.
      - TheRealPomax 4y ago
        The problem isn't that we can't build _one_ desalination plant: we totally can, and in a reasonable time frame even. It's that a single plant is not enough for the scale of the problem. A decent size desalination plant can produce 50 million gallons of water a day, with the average household in California using about 50 gallons a way. So that's only a million households covered sorted. And while it'd be tempting to say "we're not replacing the Colorado watershed, we just want to supplement it", there is literally nothing left to supplement, that thing's running completely dry, fast. So: there's about 13 million households in California alone, clearly we'd need at least 10 desalination plants: there is no way we can make that happen in less than several decades, with the main problem being the very thing we're trying to address: there is flat out not enough time to perform the necessary environmental impact assessment associated with building that many desalination plants all at the same time. Solving the fresh water shortage by destroying the entire western sea board would be insanity. So yes: absolutely, let's build a desalination plant, it'll help la bit, just like forcing people to use less water will, but once it's up it's going to take a few decades before we can properly assess what damage it does (if any) to both the local environment and those directly connected through both static and tidal currents, before we can build another one.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      > Not solvable at scale right now. It costs a fraction of a penny per gallon! I'm tempted to just call you a liar, but maybe there's some huge problem nobody has ever mentioned? And no, brine release is not that hard if you spend slightly more than the bare minimum.
      - TheRealPomax 4y ago
- kortilla 4y ago
  > Buy large amounts of water from where? California has none to buy, that's kind of what "the largest drought in recorded history" means. Buy it from the industries using the rest of the 85% of it that pay next to nothing. An incredible propaganda train has convinced people like you that residential water use is a large portion of overall CA water consumption. It’s not and residential users already pay multiple orders of magnitude per gallon more than agriculture.
  - TheRealPomax 4y ago
    The article is about residential consumption. IT doesn't matter that it's "a small fraction of the problem": it's still a problem and we need to tackle all of them, not just go "well farming's clearly the bad guy, let's ignore everything else until we locked that down". Go after everyone currently making the problem worse. I.e. exactly what we're doing. Plenty of articles to be found about new rules being put in place for industry and agriculture.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      If you reduce residential use to zero (clearly impossible, but what's a thought experiment for anyway?), you've reduced water consumption overall by 7-10%. That means that every single problem you faced before is still with you, despite having performed the impossible. Low hanging fruit, and all that ....
      - juve1996 4y ago
        That's a huge percentage. 10%! If that's true then it's a no brainer even if other things are more egregious
        PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        Do you not understand that this thought experiment reduced residential usage to ZERO ?
Skunkleton 4y ago
I was somewhat skeptical, but it does look like this comment is correct on the whole. An average household uses around .75 cubic meters of water per day, and it takes around 3.5 kWh to desalinate that much water using reverse osmosis (at scale, probably some best case. I didn't look too hard). On Silicon Valley Power (suck it PG&E losers), I pay around $0.11/kWh. So a full day's water would cost me around $0.40, or around $12/month if I were to somehow magically do this process at home. That is around 1/10th of my current water bill. That leaves plenty of room to still pay for equipment, distribution, etc. It sounds like the right time to build desalination plants is now.
- Skunkleton 4y ago
  Looking at California's total water usage [1] I would guess we are somewhere around 40 MAF per year (I hope. That can't be per day right??). Based on the probably incorrect numbers above, that translates into around a 20 GW demand for water. The diablo canyon nuclear power plant outputs 16 TWh per year. Terrible napkin math puts that at around 12 power plants needed. Oof. [1] https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/ https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
  - bombcar 4y ago
    12 nukes sounds like a small price to pay to never have to hear California bitch about water again. The other 49 states should chip in to pay for it.
- gruez 4y ago
  >An average household uses around .75 cubic meters of water per day, and it takes around 3.5 kWh to desalinate that much water using reverse osmosis (at scale, probably some best case. I didn't look too hard). >On Silicon Valley Power (suck it PG&E losers), I pay around $0.11/kWh. So a full day's water would cost me around $0.40, or around $12/month if I were to somehow magically do this process at home. That is around 1/10th of my current water bill. That leaves plenty of room to still pay for equipment, distribution, etc. That's only the electricity cost. The total cost, factoring in operating costs as well as capital expenditures range from $0.60/m³ to $1.86/m³, with the lower end being $1.63 if we only include first world countries. That leads to a per month cost that's a few times higher than your initial estimate.

by amluto 4y ago

TheRealPomax 4y ago

Buy large amounts of water from where? California has none to buy, that's kind of what "the largest drought in recorded history" means. The problem is over-consumption of water, not "people not paying their fair share for the water they do use"; there's no budget deficit, there's a water deficit. And when the problem is folks wasting water, the solution is to stop giving them unfettered access to this critical resource. They still get enough water to live off of, but nothing more.

amluto 4y ago
One can buy out farm water rights and use them for residential use. Or one can buy machinery and electricity to turn sewage into tasty potable water or turn the Pacific Ocean into tasty drinking water. The Pacific Ocean is a functionally unlimited supply — it just has the solvable problem of having minerals dissolved in it.
- Bud 4y ago
  Not solvable at scale right now. Especially with climate change impacts folded in—and remember, the whole reason we're in this mess is because of the climate change impacts we are already experiencing. Those are going to get a lot worse.
  - zbrozek 4y ago
    Why not? Our electric utilities complain about nonuniform load. Isn't a desalination plant an excellent variable load given that its product would get dumped into reservoirs? You could totally flatten the duck curve if you wanted.
    - TheRealPomax 4y ago
      The problem isn't that we can't build _one_ desalination plant: we totally can, and in a reasonable time frame even. It's that a single plant is not enough for the scale of the problem. A decent size desalination plant can produce 50 million gallons of water a day, with the average household in California using about 50 gallons a way. So that's only a million households covered sorted. And while it'd be tempting to say "we're not replacing the Colorado watershed, we just want to supplement it", there is literally nothing left to supplement, that thing's running completely dry, fast. So: there's about 13 million households in California alone, clearly we'd need at least 10 desalination plants: there is no way we can make that happen in less than several decades, with the main problem being the very thing we're trying to address: there is flat out not enough time to perform the necessary environmental impact assessment associated with building that many desalination plants all at the same time. Solving the fresh water shortage by destroying the entire western sea board would be insanity. So yes: absolutely, let's build a desalination plant, it'll help la bit, just like forcing people to use less water will, but once it's up it's going to take a few decades before we can properly assess what damage it does (if any) to both the local environment and those directly connected through both static and tidal currents, before we can build another one.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    > Not solvable at scale right now. It costs a fraction of a penny per gallon! I'm tempted to just call you a liar, but maybe there's some huge problem nobody has ever mentioned? And no, brine release is not that hard if you spend slightly more than the bare minimum.
    - TheRealPomax 4y ago
kortilla 4y ago
> Buy large amounts of water from where? California has none to buy, that's kind of what "the largest drought in recorded history" means. Buy it from the industries using the rest of the 85% of it that pay next to nothing. An incredible propaganda train has convinced people like you that residential water use is a large portion of overall CA water consumption. It’s not and residential users already pay multiple orders of magnitude per gallon more than agriculture.
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  The article is about residential consumption. IT doesn't matter that it's "a small fraction of the problem": it's still a problem and we need to tackle all of them, not just go "well farming's clearly the bad guy, let's ignore everything else until we locked that down". Go after everyone currently making the problem worse. I.e. exactly what we're doing. Plenty of articles to be found about new rules being put in place for industry and agriculture.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    If you reduce residential use to zero (clearly impossible, but what's a thought experiment for anyway?), you've reduced water consumption overall by 7-10%. That means that every single problem you faced before is still with you, despite having performed the impossible. Low hanging fruit, and all that ....
    - juve1996 4y ago
      That's a huge percentage. 10%! If that's true then it's a no brainer even if other things are more egregious
      - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        Do you not understand that this thought experiment reduced residential usage to ZERO ?

Skunkleton 4y ago

I was somewhat skeptical, but it does look like this comment is correct on the whole. An average household uses around .75 cubic meters of water per day, and it takes around 3.5 kWh to desalinate that much water using reverse osmosis (at scale, probably some best case. I didn't look too hard). On Silicon Valley Power (suck it PG&E losers), I pay around $0.11/kWh. So a full day's water would cost me around $0.40, or around $12/month if I were to somehow magically do this process at home. That is around 1/10th of my current water bill. That leaves plenty of room to still pay for equipment, distribution, etc. It sounds like the right time to build desalination plants is now.

Skunkleton 4y ago
Looking at California's total water usage [1] I would guess we are somewhere around 40 MAF per year (I hope. That can't be per day right??). Based on the probably incorrect numbers above, that translates into around a 20 GW demand for water. The diablo canyon nuclear power plant outputs 16 TWh per year. Terrible napkin math puts that at around 12 power plants needed. Oof. [1] https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/ https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
- bombcar 4y ago
  12 nukes sounds like a small price to pay to never have to hear California bitch about water again. The other 49 states should chip in to pay for it.
gruez 4y ago
>An average household uses around .75 cubic meters of water per day, and it takes around 3.5 kWh to desalinate that much water using reverse osmosis (at scale, probably some best case. I didn't look too hard). >On Silicon Valley Power (suck it PG&E losers), I pay around $0.11/kWh. So a full day's water would cost me around $0.40, or around $12/month if I were to somehow magically do this process at home. That is around 1/10th of my current water bill. That leaves plenty of room to still pay for equipment, distribution, etc. That's only the electricity cost. The total cost, factoring in operating costs as well as capital expenditures range from $0.60/m³ to $1.86/m³, with the lower end being $1.63 if we only include first world countries. That leads to a per month cost that's a few times higher than your initial estimate.