4 ms·

This is why we should be looking seriously at desalinization for both drinking and irragation water. With proper designs, we should be able to mitigate a lot o

This is why we should be looking seriously at desalinization for both drinking and irragation water. With proper designs, we should be able to mitigate a lot of the bad side effects while protecting more of the land based ecosystems.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago
Costs a lot of money. We can always make water given enough energy, and we have enough uranium to last us a few centuries if we want to build expensive nuclear plants. But no one wants to pay the cost. When we say: there is a shortage of X, what we really mean is that there is a shortage of cheap X, and we aren't yet ready to pay the cost for expensive X. Like almonds, they are yummy, but if the price went up by 10 because they had to use desalinated water, we might not eat so many.
- dspeyer 12y ago
  Any idea how hard it would be to genetically engineer an almond tree that could drink sea water?
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    Probably prohibitively difficult anytime in the forseeable future. Lots of people are spending money trying to improve, on a much more limited scale than "drink sea water", salt tolerance on a variety of crops where that is probably easier than almond trees, and that's not easy.
- astrocyte 12y ago
  Last I recalled, California has some of the highest taxes in the U.S and has the highest Gross State product. So, where's the money going? I guess everyone is so busy working their faces off that they don't have time to ask such important questions. O'well, no Desalinization plants for you. California Tax revenue : $115,089,654,000 (115 billion). I think this issues can get a hellavuh lot worse than it is right now before any serious action is taken. When I start seeing billion dollar steps being made to address the issue, that's when I'll consider that they take it seriously.
  - dude3 12y ago
    Exactly. No high speed train ($68 billion) for now. More desalination plants and irrigation.
    - astrocyte 12y ago
      California Government here : Sorry, we need to raise sales tax to 12% to fund the desalination plants. Never let a tragedy go to waste.
    - thrownaway2424 12y ago
      That's a bit of a false choice. If you don't build the trains you are either willing to forsake future mobility, or for equal mobility you are going to have to build roads and airports of far greater total cost than $68B.
- sologoub 12y ago
  We happen to have a lot of sunshine and wind... It's possible even with current tech to build plants that could basically operate on 100% renewables.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    Renewables aren't free. You have to build whatever to capture them. Even desalinization plants that use of sunshine in hot middle eastern deserts are expensive.
    - sologoub 12y ago
      Sure, but we definitely have the funds as a state as pointed out in an earlier comment. If additional revenue is needed, the state has a rather healthy economy that could greatly benefit from additional water.
      - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
        With better screens and technology that helps the plants power themselves by recycling the energy used to suck in water - in a way, like a hybrid car regenerates power from its own motion - the typical cost of running desalination plants can dip below $2,000 an acre-foot.[1] Oh, and you also need land for that next to the ocean. [1] http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Desalination-plants-a-pricey-option-if-drought-5239096.php http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Desalination-plants-a-pri...
adventured 12y ago
Makes me wonder how much electricity a 50 acre almond farm could generate from solar power, to contribute to the vast electricity requirements of desalinization. The new billion dollar San Diego desalination plant can produce 18 billion gallons of water per year, at a cost of $1 per ~162 gallons (1/2 of one cent per gallon; or roughly $2,000 per acre foot of water, about 325,000 gallons). From what I can find, almond growing in California consumes 1.1 trillion gallons of water per year. So it would take ~60 modern desalination plants at a cost of $1 billion each to provide water for just California's present almond growing....
- thrownaway2424 12y ago
  On 50 acres you could get maybe 5MW peak power, extrapolating from the utility-scale project being built in San Benito County claiming 247MW on 2500 acres.
  - adventured 12y ago
    For reference it takes 38 megawatts of power to generate 50 million gallons of water per day from that San Diego plant.
    - thrownaway2424 12y ago
      That's 150AF. An orchard needs at most 4 feet of water per year, and let's say you can count on 1 foot of that falling from the sky. Your 50 acres of solar could therefore produce enough water every day to irrigate 50 acres of orchard for a year, or in other words if you devoted less than 1% of your land to solar power you could irrigate the rest of it with desalinated water. Of course, California producers would never do that because they would have to put up their own money. History shows that what farmers want in the way of infrastructure gets paid for by the public (dams, aqueducts, levees, drainage, etc). Edit: whoops that's high by almost a factor of 10x, but I'll leave it the way I originally wrote it.

seanmcdirmid 12y ago

Costs a lot of money. We can always make water given enough energy, and we have enough uranium to last us a few centuries if we want to build expensive nuclear plants. But no one wants to pay the cost. When we say: there is a shortage of X, what we really mean is that there is a shortage of cheap X, and we aren't yet ready to pay the cost for expensive X. Like almonds, they are yummy, but if the price went up by 10 because they had to use desalinated water, we might not eat so many.

dspeyer 12y ago
Any idea how hard it would be to genetically engineer an almond tree that could drink sea water?
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  Probably prohibitively difficult anytime in the forseeable future. Lots of people are spending money trying to improve, on a much more limited scale than "drink sea water", salt tolerance on a variety of crops where that is probably easier than almond trees, and that's not easy.
astrocyte 12y ago
Last I recalled, California has some of the highest taxes in the U.S and has the highest Gross State product. So, where's the money going? I guess everyone is so busy working their faces off that they don't have time to ask such important questions. O'well, no Desalinization plants for you. California Tax revenue : $115,089,654,000 (115 billion). I think this issues can get a hellavuh lot worse than it is right now before any serious action is taken. When I start seeing billion dollar steps being made to address the issue, that's when I'll consider that they take it seriously.
- dude3 12y ago
  Exactly. No high speed train ($68 billion) for now. More desalination plants and irrigation.
  - astrocyte 12y ago
    California Government here : Sorry, we need to raise sales tax to 12% to fund the desalination plants. Never let a tragedy go to waste.
  - thrownaway2424 12y ago
    That's a bit of a false choice. If you don't build the trains you are either willing to forsake future mobility, or for equal mobility you are going to have to build roads and airports of far greater total cost than $68B.
sologoub 12y ago
We happen to have a lot of sunshine and wind... It's possible even with current tech to build plants that could basically operate on 100% renewables.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Renewables aren't free. You have to build whatever to capture them. Even desalinization plants that use of sunshine in hot middle eastern deserts are expensive.
  - sologoub 12y ago
    Sure, but we definitely have the funds as a state as pointed out in an earlier comment. If additional revenue is needed, the state has a rather healthy economy that could greatly benefit from additional water.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      With better screens and technology that helps the plants power themselves by recycling the energy used to suck in water - in a way, like a hybrid car regenerates power from its own motion - the typical cost of running desalination plants can dip below $2,000 an acre-foot.[1] Oh, and you also need land for that next to the ocean. [1] http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Desalination-plants-a-pricey-option-if-drought-5239096.php http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Desalination-plants-a-pri...

adventured 12y ago

Makes me wonder how much electricity a 50 acre almond farm could generate from solar power, to contribute to the vast electricity requirements of desalinization. The new billion dollar San Diego desalination plant can produce 18 billion gallons of water per year, at a cost of $1 per ~162 gallons (1/2 of one cent per gallon; or roughly $2,000 per acre foot of water, about 325,000 gallons). From what I can find, almond growing in California consumes 1.1 trillion gallons of water per year. So it would take ~60 modern desalination plants at a cost of $1 billion each to provide water for just California's present almond growing....

thrownaway2424 12y ago
On 50 acres you could get maybe 5MW peak power, extrapolating from the utility-scale project being built in San Benito County claiming 247MW on 2500 acres.
- adventured 12y ago
  For reference it takes 38 megawatts of power to generate 50 million gallons of water per day from that San Diego plant.
  - thrownaway2424 12y ago
    That's 150AF. An orchard needs at most 4 feet of water per year, and let's say you can count on 1 foot of that falling from the sky. Your 50 acres of solar could therefore produce enough water every day to irrigate 50 acres of orchard for a year, or in other words if you devoted less than 1% of your land to solar power you could irrigate the rest of it with desalinated water. Of course, California producers would never do that because they would have to put up their own money. History shows that what farmers want in the way of infrastructure gets paid for by the public (dams, aqueducts, levees, drainage, etc). Edit: whoops that's high by almost a factor of 10x, but I'll leave it the way I originally wrote it.