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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Imagine living in a world where we say "it's pointless! don't do anything, it's all out of your control." That's what we always say.
Imagine saying to someone losing weight "don't bother, losing 2 lbs this week is meaningless when you're 100 overweight."
Defeatist ideology. I get it, you want to be "right" while the problems continue. A classic problem with engineers - think of everyway it is meaningless or doesn't work, instead of "how can I make this work?" The solutions are not mutually exclusive. If the deficit is 2% then a 2% reduction in household use can be effective. Even if it's 4%.
> Imagine saying to someone losing weight "don't bother, losing 2 lbs this week is meaningless when you're 100 overweight."
You’re not gripping the math here. The correct analogy is, someone is obese and is constantly gaining weight. They are running a 1000 calorie surplus and 100 calories of that comes from breakfast. You’re sitting here arguing about taking 20-30 calories away from breakfast because that’s the only meal you help prepare. It’s nearly completely worthless, doesn’t address the fundamental problem, and you’re convinced it will “help”.
You're not gripping reality here. It always helps. Using less water means we have water for longer.
Running at a deficit of 10% vs 5% would make an enormous difference. It would extend the water we have now as we identify ways to mitigate the problem. If it's wasted water it's wasted water. That "slight difference" could be 20 extra years. A drought could end in that time frame.
That 100 calories saved could mean 20 lbs, the difference between getting a back surgery or not because it's too dangerous at weights above X (this is real, btw.) It matters. Even if it doesn't seem like it to you.
Reducing agricultural use by 1% would essentially be equivalent to reducing domestic use to zero.
Which one do you think we should strive for, given that per-capita domestic use has been dropping for nearly 3 decades in cities across the southwest already, by as much as 33% ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Scale is not about money alone. Building one of them: entirely doable. And can be started on today, let's go!
But we don't need one, we'd need 10+ of them just for California alone, and there is literally no way to perform all the environmental impact studies necessary to determine that building 10+ desalination plants along the coast all at the same time wouldn't just make the problem exponentially worse. You know what would be insanely stupid? Creating just enough fresh water for a single state to cope, but at the cost of destroying the entire western sea board ecosystem, affecting all pacific states, Canada, Mexico, and a good part of Central and South America, too.
Ten is a tiny number and you can do an analysis of similar quality to a smaller setup. I really don't understand your argument here.
If you put the pipes far out then that's so so so much ocean involved to get a river's worth of water. The right design could even reduce the salinity near shore as runoff increases (or trivially counteract that, of course).
Have you done ten seconds of research about this yet? You should find time for that. Would clear up a lot of things for you.
Short version: we are far, far too late to start building infrastructure now and make up for a Colorado River's worth of water, and desalination tech right now uses a LOT of energy. Which exacerbates all the climate issues that are causing this to begin with.
Were you asleep for the last 40 years while this was all being discussed?
> Have you done ten seconds of research about this yet? You should find time for that. Would clear up a lot of things for you.
Point me to whatever source you think supports your argument that it can't be done.
> Short version: we are far, far too late to start building infrastructure now and make up for a Colorado River's worth of water,
We're going to need water forever. It's never too late.
> and desalination tech right now uses a LOT of energy. Which exacerbates all the climate issues that are causing this to begin with.
So build power plants that don't release carbon. If you want to get really particular, sell the water at a price that lets you build 2x as many power plants as you need, so even after considering construction costs you're reducing the net CO2 output.
But also, what are you talking about when you say it's not solvable or buildable? Adding 50% more water to the residential supply would be 3 million acre-feet, which would take 15-30 terawatt hours of power each year. California already uses 260TWh. That's very obviously feasible.
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.
>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.
W-1A (what a residential user in SF is likely to pay): $7.60 per CCF ($21.51/m^3) for the first 4 CCF/mo.
W-25 (wholesale buyers like other water districts): $4.10/CCF ($11.60 / m^3)
Even rate W-24 (untreated water from reservoir) is about $2.69/m^3. For all I know, the reservoir in question is Hetch Hetchy, but even this rate is above estimates of the cost of desalination.
The obvious conclusion is that the actual cost of desalination is not even close to being a problem. Of course, this is CA, and it’s easy to throw a few tens of $bn at a project and get absolutely nothing out.
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.
(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.)