As a followup - the video above claims that desalinated water costs about $0.40 per cubic meter to Israel. 100 cubic feet is roughly 3 cubic meters - so about $1.2 per hundred cubic feet. Here are the water rates in San Diego (HCF is hundred cubic feet)
0 - 8 HCF used are billed at $3.896 per HCF.
9 - 24 HCF used are billed at $4.364 per HCF.
25 - 36 HCF used are billed at $6.234 per HCF.
Each HCF used after the initial 36 HCF is billed at $8.766 per HCF.
Seems like desalination is very economical at these rates.
I’m pretty sure there’s an error in your economic analysis, because the Israeli price you’re quoting is an order of magnitude less than the San Diego price.
It might be that the government of Israel subsidizes water and the price the end users pay is a small fraction of the total cost. Or it could be that the video is wrong. Or it could be a conversion error.
This article from 2009, about increases of 25% in each of the next two years, says, “Water in Israel currently costs consumers approximately between 5.50 and 8 shekels (between $1.50 and slightly more than $2.00) per cubic meter.”
Right, which means it doesn’t take into account building and maintaining the infrastructure to deliver the water to those end users. There’s this (admittedly somewhat old) article which says that water prices start at 5.50 NIS per cubic meter, and are going up 25 percent (as of 2009). Based on my shitty math that’s $5.33 per HCF. And then I found this article saying that prices went up another 5%, which my math comes out as (at current exchange rates) $5.76 per HCF. That’s for the first 2.5 cubic meters of water (per person), with additional cubic meters being billed at $8.34 per HCF.
Israeli companies are building desalination plants in California, but California has 5 times the population and a lot more land mass to transport it over, so I can only imagine that prices will be even higher there.
Desalination is certainly possible. But the plants are expensive, and in the past have been mothballed when the drought passed. Plus, what do you do with the resulting brine? You could dump it back into the ocean, but that’s terrible for the marine environment.
Yes, they’re quoting the price for apples and you’re comparing that to oranges. I provided 2 cites showing what water costs to consumers in Israel. Do whatever you want with that knowledge.
No they are quoting cost to produce. You are quoting price to consumers. Whether something is economically feasible depends on cost being lower than price. NPR shows that it is lower than price, both in Israel and in (as I showed) CA. QED.
Desalinated water at the Soreq plant is produced at the price of 52 cents a cubic meter, according to terms of a government tender, and while actual rates fluctuate according to energy costs, currency exchange and the cost-of-living index, they remain significantly lower than in other nations.
It could be the difference is whether “cost to produce” includes the capital cost of the plant itself, or just the operating costs of the plant. If the desal plant appears by magic, provided by the taxpayers, then sure the cost of the water to the customers could be very low. If the customers have to finance the plant then the cost increases dramatically.
The US has a military budget much greater than anyone else, they also lock up more of their population than anyone else, and tied to the military budget, have hundreds of foreign bases.
You expect us to be able to afford to solve a drought crisis?
Israel’s desalination plants were built by private companies, not with taxpayer money. The cost of Israel’s four desalination plants was around $1.2B total. The capacity is about 300M cubic meters annually. Thus, if they add $1 to each cubic meter price, making the price $1.40 (and thus making the price to consumer comparable to California consumer prices) they pay for themselves in four years.