I disagree that we should build desalination, even if we can "afford" it. There are agricultural users of water paying astronomically lower prices due to long standing water rights. It would almost certainly be cheaper to pay them to conserve (grow less of water-wasting crops, leave fields fallow, or upgrade to more efficient drip irrigation). The urban water use is around 20%, making them pay billions for this 20% makes no sense when the majority of the remaining is wasted on inefficient agriculture.

If we actually had scarce water and agriculture could pay market rate for desalinated water along side residential consumers then we should build. I don't think there are there yet. Maybe soon...

Yeah, buying out the current water right owners and moving towards market prices on water seems like the best way to handle this.

But that requires a government that can and wants to do things. I hope to be surprised, but I don't see California doing either of these things...

That requires a population that wants a government that does things. Not very popular in the US.

Or just make agriculture desalinate their own water on their own dime and let the people continue drinking the ground/river water.

It's not like you should be irrigating fields with that mineral-heavy water anyways, isn't it slowly salting the land?

If agriculture had to foot the bill for their desalination needs they would become more efficient automatically.

OOH, pipe the water in from mid ocean, farmers (us subsidizing of course) desal and use the water. This has prob been brought up but i aint heard it yet. I like it.

Solutions that ensure access to a necessary element for all life are not mutually exclusive. The water rights (and disputes) date back centuries; waiting for the courts could easily result in calamity -- even if those rights are quintessentially & obviously a non-ideal "tragedy of the commons."

> leave fields fallow

Please no. We're facing intense inflation, and the solution has to involve supply-side improvements, not just demand-side tweaks.

Subsidies for drip irrigation sounds interesting, though - as long as actual water usage reduction is part of the requirement.

California can internally counter that problem by giving people a corresponding tax break or any number of policy remedies. For the rest of the nation, there is no obvious cooperative framework to explain to Californians on why they should face the looming risk of a water crisis on behalf of the rest of the nation, especially in such a hostile national atmosphere. California can also continue to provide favorable economic policy to staple crops as opposed to nice-to-have crops.

And it's not just California facing a water crisis. The Colorado river flows through multiple states and it's drying up at an alarming rate.

But we can agree that all available policy knobs should be tuned.

I wouldnt say drying up but not refilling up but, yeah, otherwise, california is the garden, fruit, non-wheat bread basket of most the country. This water was being used to build wealth among a small group of farmers that sent the food out of state. I say cut it off.

It might be objectively better to pay someone to not grow alfalfa for export to the middle east then it is to waste water on growing it. In the end, this is likely cheaper than building desalination infrastructure to make up for the wasted water so you save money. Don't think this is a good long term plan though.

> In the end, this is likely cheaper than building desalination infrastructure to make up for the wasted water so you save money.

Fresh water is scarce and the demand for fresh water continues to grow annually (growing population, growing economy, etc). Fresh water is an appreciating asset, with fixed (or reducing) supply. Increasing the supply of fresh water is beneficial for many, many reasons globally, and increasing investment into desalination will keep reducing the cost (helping developing countries also build desalination).

Getting society to "use less fresh water" is non-competitive, and at best a medium term "stop gap". The economy is competitive, it doesn't "allow for" non-competitive players. You can try to change the inertia of the economy, but you would likely fail.

Building infrastructure to increase the amount of fresh water we have on earth (without unaccounted for externalities - e.g. it should be carbon-neutral/negative) is economically competitive and as such 1. durable; 2. improves lives; 3. changes the mental-model from "wasted water" to "wasted energy" (which is a simpler problem to solve).

> I disagree that we should build desalination, even if we can "afford" it.

Spreading this message of disagreement with increasing durable, cost-effective, and carbon-neutral infrastructure because it is not cost-optimal does a disservice to the global population and the long term sustainability of the global ecosystem. Way better off with the message "I agree with building more desalination. We should also get ... to do ...".

I say abolish golf courses

> pay someone to not grow alfalfa for export to the middle east

Or just add tariffs for anything we'd like to curb export of - that's the traditional solution, and it does work. Then turn around and use the tariff proceeds to further alleviate water issues.

Or let the market price and allocate water.

>The urban water use is around 20%

which means that around $20B/year will cover desalination of all the water consumed in California solving all the environmental issues caused by water consumption, and all those problems probably would become close to nonexistent even if we cover only half the needs at $10B/year. Especially considering that climate change would be making situation only worse, and thus desalination is unavoidable anyway.

Now that there is a Tier 1 & escallating water shortage, there literally is no longer a water resource available to farmers. Personally, the thought of the state paying people to lower usage sounds absurd, when there literally was not the resource to use in the first place. These water-rights holders are holding rights which are underwater.

I hope we do this instead of financialzing one more necessity of life. Structurally increasing such supply significantly will really bring down the costs and can help people worldwide

And that doesn't even begin to factor in the revenue opportunities from scaling up desalination further for export to neighboring states (most of which are even more arid than California).

I've said it before and I'll say it again: California food and (desalinated) water in exchange for Nevada electricity (be it solar, geothermal, or nuclear) would mutually benefit both states and produce one hell of an economic juggernaut.

Pumping water from the California coast to Nevada is not a good idea. You’re basically describing a hydro plant, in reverse, carrying expensive water.

California's existing aqueduct system already moves water over greater distances. If Northern California can supply Southern California's water, then so can Coastal California supply water for Inland California and beyond.

Hell...

Lake Lahontan. Megalake. Barely alive. Gentlemen, we can refill it. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic lake. Lake Lahontan will be that lake. Better than it was before. Wider. Deeper. Wetter.

jazzy intro music

There's the small problem of it being much more difficult for water to go up a mountain than down it.

I mean the aqueduct system already pumps water up 1900 feet over the Tehachapi mountains[0], so that might be hard but feasible.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonston_Pumping_Plant

That's where Nevada being a giant blob of untapped geothermal energy (not to mention open desert for solar and nuclear) comes in.

Parts of Nevada are below sea level so the total energy expenditure to move water should be "minimal". This would be after making aqueducts. My thinking is, if the Romans could move water over mountains without pipes, so too can the Americans.

Which parts of Nevada are below sea level? Lowest point IIRC is around 400ft.

Not anywhere near where the people live, that’s for sure.

Reno: 4500’

Vegas: 2000’

that’s a huge amount of potential energy to pump water from the sea

Plus the whole Sierra Nevada mountains thing. Between Sacramento and Reno Interstate 80 peaks over 7000 feet.

It also makes no sense because it would be cheaper and easier to just ween California off the Colorado river which already passes through Nevada and other states in the southwest.

I think this is the easiest solution to the water problem there. You already effectively have a massive pipeline in the form of a river. Luckily, the state with coastal access has the highest water allocation for it.

So we sell them the water from the Colorado river, and use the money to build power plants there, with which we will power our expanded desalination for the benefit of agribusiness foreign and domestic?

I mean, it would probably work, right?

Not really much different than pumping Owen's valley water to LA...

A quick google search says Owen's valley is at 4k feet, while LA is at 300. I assume that reversing that would be incredibly expensive, considering the 570,000 acre-feet/year that flows is 1.5 trillion lbs of water.

So, I think it depends on where it's being pumped from/to.

There are mountains in the way though.

We'll just use the same boring machines we'd use for the long-overdue SF/NY Burrito Pipeline.

It is not politically possible to build desalination plants (or much of anything else really) in California. In just May of this year[1], a private company that had spent $100 million trying to get approval to build a $1.4 billion de-sal plant in the L.A. basin. It would have served about 400,000 homes but the permit was denied by regulators. Private money would build these plants if allowed.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-reject...

> Private money would build these plants if allowed.

By replacing one environmental problem with another:

> The commission's staff experts said the facility would destroy marine life in about 100 billion gallons of seawater per year, and the company's ability to mitigate that damage with wildlife habitat restoration fell far short of state requirements.

From the same article:

> Environmentalists have long said desalination harms ocean life, costs too much money and energy, and the plant would soon be made obsolete by water recycling.

Well if that's true then awesome, let's get busy recycling water and "soon" we won't need to desalinate!

I actually wonder (yes, I'm not an expert) whether at some point drinking water will be valuable enough that you could profitably build a desalination plant in international waters and then deliver the water in tanks to the thirsty citizens who can pay for it. If you bottled at the source, maybe it wouldn't be more expensive than importing from France or Fiji?

> acre-feet

Being European, that's the weirdest unit of volume, I've ever seen.

Yes, metric is nice.

In the meantime, the acre is the standard unit of area for farms, fields, residential property, other property, parks, and certain other uses of land. A house on a quarter-acre lot generally has a backyard, and would fit in most suburbs. A house on a half-acre lot has a big backyard with plenty of room for your kids to run around. A full acre is getting pretty decently big — it's more like the size of a small field that you'd use for growing crops (which is the origin of the measure: 1 farmer-pair-of-oxen-plow-day.)

Rain is measured in inches and feet.

Just multiply two values people use in practice and get another that they can use in practice: acre-feet. Are you forecast for three inches (0.25 feet) of rain, on your forty-acre property? That's 10 acre-feet of water you can get from the sky instead of the irrigation authority. Like most things customary, it's easier to use in some ways, harder in others.

I mean c'mon, it's so simple. One acre is just one chain by one furlong, then you multiply that 12 inches and that's an acre foot.

Ok fine, that might be too complicated, an acre is merely however much land a single man and an oxen team could plough in a single day. Just take that value in your head and multiply it by the length of a medieval king's [citation needed] foot and there you go, acre-feet.

Googling research papers on the subject of European irrigation, I'm mostly finding water usages quoted as mm/yr. Cultivated land area seems to be discussed, explicitly but often implicitly, in hectares. But I'm having trouble finding statements or graphs that show mm/yr/ha or mm/ha.

Unless I'm missing something (and I very well may be), I'll take acre-feet over mm/yr. acre-feet seems a more useful standard compound unit for discussing large scale (agricultural, industrial, etc) water usage, even if the underlying units are more archaic. If you're going to drop or leave implicit one of the three dimensions, time seems like the much better choice than area.

But maybe I'm biased by familiarity (and utter lack of expertise), or maybe I'm just wrong about the standard terminology. I need to get back to hacking, otherwise I'd keep digging....

You should get out more:

http://www.buyinchiangmai.com/land-measurements-in-thailand....

[Edit: And in Hungary, which is also European, you usually use hektár (ha) and négyzetméter (m2) now but you'd better know your hold ( ~ acre) and négyszögöl ( ~ square fathom) if you want to buy agricultural land.]

Being American, same.

> It would cost

What costs does this $419/acre-foot cover?

(1 acre-foot = 325,851 gallons)

You'd also have to include the cost of transporting that water to every place that's not next to the desalinisation plant(s). That can be expensive, particulaly uphill to the mountains.

And does it cover the cost of handling the byproducts?

Today we pay about $120/mo for about 5000 gallons, so $1440 for 60000 gallons per year, so $2275 for acre-foot. Difficult to believe desalinized water would be as cheap as $419 since it is always described as very expensive way to get water.

As others have noted, desalination cause enormous amounts of waste. So then, the next environmental topic needs to be addressed.

I believe there are other, better ways to handle limited water supplies like finding inefficacies in the system and plugging those holes. Changing from mass monocultures to perma-cultures.

Unfortunately, they are much more boring than desalination plants.

There are great videos on this on YT, like [1]. Go and check them out.

[1] https://youtu.be/W-f2genlUZI

Climate change is causing droughts, so we'll burn coal to run a desalination plant, so that we keep growing alfalfa for the meat industry.

Which will obviously accelerate the climate change, but that's the next generations problem. We just need to get through this election cycle without forcing any unpleasant lifestyle changes.

John Oliver just had a segment on water: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtxew5XUVbQ

In the episode, there's literally a farmer that says that he grows a water inefficient crop deliberately in order to hold on to water rights (@ 8:38). "Use it or lose it" water rights are ass backwards to put it mildly.

Make agriculture figure how to use less water or face penalties. That's the way forward.

"Property" rights is the backbone of an economy

I admit I’m not familiar with current techniques for desalination at scale, but I’m curious what the energy requirements would be?

Apparently it's not solar concentrators/evaporators like I thought. Instead they use good old fossil fuel to do it.

After reading how Bermudans adapted to limited water supply and are good at rationing even though they do have desalinators now, it's pretty strange.

it works really well if you site it with a nuclear plant....

> Average household consumes 0.5-1.0 acre-feet of water per year.

Out of curiosity, I did the math for grass lawns. Kentucky Bluegrass requires 1inch/week, meaning a 1000sqft lawn will required around 0.09 acre-feet/year.

My knee-jerk reaction was to ban lawns, but that seems misguided, assuming my math is correct.

I feel there should more efficient to use solar heat into evaporating the ocean to make clouds and more rain. Anyone aware of this? I'm thinking windmills that pump water to create mist or floating black panels that absorb IR and heat water.

Well California’s most recently completed desalinization plant took 9 years to get permitted. That’s not the time to build, just the time to get a permit, so I wouldn’t hold your breath on California building any more desalinization plants

California just decided not to build desalination -- the decision was unanimous from the water board responsible for approving projects -- on the ground that more water isn't needed

You have to budget in the water for the almond fields as well.

You'd think the almond farmers would be the ones to do that.

As long as the price tag on water does not reflect its actual cost on environment and society, they couldn't care less.

Similar to carbon emissions and any other pollution. Once you put an accurate price tag on it, simultaneously avoiding the corruption that usually comes with certificates and that kind of thing, then you'll get somewhere.

What happens if it simply becomes as populous as Arizona or New Mexico?

That seems wasteful. How about a biotech startup that merges fish DNA with human DNA that gives humans the ability to consume saltwater directly. As an added bonus we can give people gills aka built-in SCUBA equipment.