Where are you going to locate these “30 large nuke/desal plant”? La Jolla Bay? Seal Beach? Ventura? Mussel Shoals? Isla Vista? Pismo? Morro Bay? Moss Landing? Monterey? Half Moon Bay? Pacifica? Tomales Bay? Bodega Bay? Cape Blanco? Gualala? Eureka? The Lost Fucking Coast? How are you going to transport this desalinated water inland across the Coastal Ranges? Every reasonably accessible area on the California Pacific Coast is well occupied. Building nuclear powered desalination plants sufficient to provide water for agriculture and industry inland is going to require relocating these well-heeled land owners elsewhere. Who bells that particular feline and under what excuse of eminent domain?
But by all means, submit a proposal for study to the State of California. By all accounts, they’ll spew out hundreds of millions of dollars just as they have for studies of a totally impractical high speed rail system from Los Angeles to San Francisco.
The need isn’t water for household use, which comprises substantially less than 1% of all water consumption in California overall. The need is inland in agricultural areas, where water has to be pumped over or around geographical obstacles (i.e. mountains) in order to get to geographically distributed end use sites. Again, this is like trying to build a ski resort in Jamaica or run a cruise ship leaving from Austria.
Give up. The poster is convinced that there ARE simple solutions that any 8th grader could see but the entire population of CA is too stupid to figure out.
The tip-off was zeroing in on toilets, not orchards or factories.
the only person saying the solution is easy is you.
Here’s an idea, the people in California can do what they do best and that’s fuck themselves in the ass. They pissed around for YEARS with brownouts well past the crisis stage and then triumphantly declared themselves geniuses for building peak use generators to deal with it. They’re on track to repeat the process with water. Because somehow doing nothing is better than dealing with reality.
The average central valley resident gives zero fucks about tree nut crops, but the growers of these insanely water inefficient crops make a metric shitload of money doing it and buy themselves lots and lots of influence.
Hey! We had one poster who was boycotting all CA produce because some almond orchard was using water from fracking!
That’ll teach them not to use scrounged up water! Demand only fresh water be used on trees!
All you folks who think CA growers are wasting too much water:
Just stop buying almonds, cabbage, rice, strawberries, etc., etc., etc. - once there is no market, all those nasty orchards will die and everything will be wonderful! The unicorns will soon appear!
Some people say ONLY twice as much, others say HOLY CRAP THAT’S TWICE AS MUCH! All sorts of issues here. Raising rates by 100% on low-income is a tough sell politically, then you start putting it more on the middle class and affluent and Commercial & Industrial to make up the difference, then your top industrial customers threaten to close down their plants and move to the next state over (which they can and will do), and then your labor reps and local politicians and newspapers start hammering you about potential job losses, and then the special interest groups get involved (Eco’s and others), and then the plants being built come in way over budget so rates go even higher. Happens all the time in the electric industry. Water wouldn’t be any different.
If that’s your attitude around willingness-to-pay, why even bother building desal plants? Just raise the rates now and demand will self-adjust to match supply.
Similar wand-waving happened with energy and the state “decided” to go heavy renewables and now has 20 cent/kwh electric rates while others have 8-12 cent rates. Honestly if CA was in the Midwest and not on the coast with some decent ports, it would be a bankrupt wasteland.
Deals will be made, there will be winners and losers, and rates will go up… but it will not be easy or pretty.