California labels itself as the world's 7th or 10th largest economy, I think that if they wanted to, they could have invested in desalination plants across their coast to have all the water they need and more.
My 2c.
My 2c.
surely it's more complicated than that?!
Better plan would probably be to build a nuclear plant in Arizona and export the power to California. Use some of it for desalination. Then export water to Arizona.
But nowadays calling people hippies or conservitards is what passes for analysis, civic discourse, and problem solving.
[1] https://www.sdcwa.org/your-water/local-water-supplies/seawat...
Desalination is practical when paired with nuclear power (there is a possibility for even things like directly using the heat from nuclear to desalinate without converting to electricity and then back to heat first). But California seems dead-set on shuttering any nuclear plants and using imported power made with fossil fuels in other states instead.
My in laws have to deal with rolling blackouts during very hot days at dusk. Perhaps after telling town residents not to flush toilets, take showers, or order tap water in restaurants, we can next just say to use no electricity at all. Might as well go back to the Stone Age.
Yes, but that’s like saying it doesn’t matter if you get shot because the volume of the room is still less than 1ppb lead. You need to plan for how to avoid massive ecological disruption in the local area, which is possible but adds to the expense and gives NIMBYs another opportunity to delay or block things. These are classic economic problems: when something else is subsidized low, it’s hard for a competitor which doesn’t share those benefits to get established even if everyone would be better off in the long-term.
Nuclear is a distraction - you don’t need such expensive power for this, or even the near-free solar California’s renewable focus will produce at many times. Researchers have been developing passive solar systems which use solar power directly and are suitable for deployment in places which don’t have enormous supplies of cheap electricity.
To give you an idea of the scale involved, one of Israel's large desalination plants produced 332 acre-feet of water per day. The Red Sea is around 1.8 * 10^11 acre feet of water, so assuming the Red Sea never got replenished, that would take... 1.5 million years to empty it out.
The plant is removing about 1,300 tons of salt per day, which may sound like a lot, but consider that the ocean currently has about 5.0 * 10^16 of salt in it, it's not significant, assuming they were discharging the salt to the ocean - which they don't! The output of a desalination plant is more brine produced than freshwater produced, so it's not at a very large concentration and the impact on sea life is minimal.
Nuclear isn't a distraction because nuclear was already installed, was working, and is sustainable. Researchers are working on a lot of things, but research doesn't equal something that can actually meet demand for water today. Desalination works today and people rely on it for water around the globe. This would be a great improvement over trying to empty out Lake Mead and the Colorado.
The country doesn't need the huge quantities of alfalfa produced in California. Much of that is exported. We can cut way back. A political solution will have to be found that allows charging farmers market rates for water.