Here is a better example: The Sierra Club:
http://angeles2.sierraclub.org/news/blog/2014/01/ocean_desalination_bigger_picture
Here is a better example: The Sierra Club:
http://angeles2.sierraclub.org/news/blog/2014/01/ocean_desalination_bigger_picture
We do that here in Irvine. Cheaper than de-sal, and other water districts should do the same:
Are we going to have to come down there and burn the White House again?
I can just see Michelle running around scooping up her favourite items like Dolly Madison. There’s a workout for ya, weights and cardio…
Out of curiosity how much of Cal’s ag industry follows best practices to minimize evaporation and run off losses like zero till and underground irrigation? As much as I loathe the whole idea of commoditizing water more than it already has been, it seems the only way people start respecting anything is when they have to pay directly through the nose for it.
David Feldman does some research on how water is controlled. He has a full hour-long lecture here:
He also works on researching the impact: [quote] Additional pumping costs come to $454 million. Crop losses will cost the industry $810 million. Losses from livestock and dairy revenues cost will $203 million in 2014. This adds up to $1.5 billion in direct losses, the study reported.The study concludes that the drought this year will have a $2.2 billion economic impact in the industry and displace 17,100 jobs.
[/quote]
From that link,
That is not blanket opposition to desal, it is opposition to specific projects (bad desal, as it were).
Yeah - but I have been to the meetings and there is one group that will fight anything less than zero impact on the ocean. I fully support the Sierra Club, but they have a strong zero tolerance attitude on certain subjects. Of course, they don’t SAY never, but sometimes their requests / demands make it effectively prohibitive:
Water is metered and charged by the utility. So you can institute 2 tier pricing (or 4 tier pricing!). Meaning every household gets a set amount at one price, then has to pay more above that. Since the action is with high use consumers (and especially businesses), this works pretty well.
You can even have income based programs, like they do with electricity.
I understand it’s a little more complicated. Big ag can respond to new legislation with lawsuits. They also have some sympathy from the public. So it makes political sense and possibly moral sense to crack down on backyard jungle fauna before asking a rice farmer to close up shop.
Excellent question. We should look into that.
I suspect rice and alfalfa farmers have greater exit opportunities. It wouldn’t surprise me if many existing almond growers are making among the most productive use of water resources at the margin. Not quite microchip fabbers but still.
Also, for those wanting a high tech solution… think about… icebergs. Though frankly I don’t see such options as the first thing we should reach for.
Here is a place to start, though not comprehensive, and kind of a pain to go through. I looked at residential and non-residential rates the the Visalia and the Stockton areas: in the Stockton district, non-residential rates go down after 30K cu-ft. Visalia has two rates that look like you pay more with a bigger pipe, but the rates are not usage-tiered (paying higher or lower rates after a cut-off volume). Residential rates in both are 3-tiered on usage volume (increasing rates for higher volumes).
It looks like CalWater is the private, suburban/rural provider, the big cities (and probably some of the smaller ones) may have their own utility or provider.
[QUOTE=Measure for Measure]
Also, for those wanting a high tech solution… think about… icebergs. Though frankly I don’t see such options as the first thing we should reach for.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, I always thought why couldn’t we use ships (really REALLY big ones :p) or build a pipeline. I guess the answer is we COULD…but the costs would be huge and so far we haven’t been desperate enough to seriously look at it.
I suppose a real high tech solution might be geo-engineering where you re-sculpt the continents to shift gulf streams to bring water to dry parts of the world…or maybe mine water on asteroids, pack it up and drop it somehow to the dry parts of the world without causing catastrophic damage. Or, on the mystic side, you could get the rain god from Hitchhikers Guide to move to California…
Probably actually feasible. Some sort of satellite umbrella, or periodic dumping of light-absorbent matter into the sky, to change local temperatures, diverting air and water currents.
But…if we bring water to California…we’re diverting it away from somewhere else. Awfully close to an act of war.
(Bummer when CA’s “El Nino” rains are associated with drought in Australia.)
If we use my numbers from before (which are probably wrong), and assume 260 W per m[sup]3[/sup]/day. We need 49 km[sup]3[/sup]/year, or 1.342×10[sup]8[/sup] m[sup]3[/sup]/day. So that’s 35 GW of desal power for the entire state. Kashiwazaki-Kariwa is about 8 GW, so all we need is 4-5 gigantic nuclear plants. This enviro will go for that. I suspect others won’t.
Of course, you’re not going to have dedicated desal nukes. Let’s emulate the Fujairah plant and pretend it’s nuclear. That plant is expected to use only 16% of its power for desal, 66% goes to the grid, and the rest to transmission losses. So for 35 GW of desal power, we’ll build 220 GW of nuke plants (about 27 Kashiwazaki-Kariwas), which will also supply 140 GW of electrical power.
EIA tells me that California consumes about 7.6 quads, annually, which comes out to average power of 250 GW. However EIA is looking at total energy consumption, which goes to all sorts of other uses. This website tells me generated + imported comes out at ~300 GW.h in 2009, or 34 GW.
So 30 giant nukes, all of the water it needs, and electricity exports to surrounding states. Sign me up.
For importing water by ship, this website lists shipping costs for petroleum. If we look at the longer distances (e.g. not just across the Gulf of Mexico) and assume $2/B, and if I’m correct that one acre foot is 10,345 barrels, that’s ~$21k/acre foot. Never mind that water is dense and corrosive.
Since XT has “always thought why couldn’t we use ships”, I hope I have lifted a mental burden.
And while I appreciate all the effort you put into this, you should have checked out the tongue in cheek part of the statement where I said really REALLY big ships. Just to clear things up, I was joking and playing along with Measure for Measure’s link talking about how to putting ice chips in oil tankers.
In case you were wondering, I also don’t think we could geo-engineer the earth to bring moisture laden gulf streams to the dry parts of the world or drop water laden asteroids in the Sahara. In case you were going to go there next.
That would be silly! No point in dropping them in the Sahara, gotta drop them on L.A. Gotta think these things through!
Well, that would certainly take care of at least some of the water issue in California. If we also dropped some on the Central Valley we may be able to solve the issue outright, even if our asteroids weren’t water laden.
Market pricing, but with a generous Basic Income Guarantee?
And you’re in DC, so little risk to you if some of those are in geologically sensitive locations. :dubious:
Although I work a lot in CA. But we can build some out here too. The east coast also needs water. And we have our earthquakes too. North Anna Nuclear Generating Station - Wikipedia
Producing a large percent of an area’s electricity from nuclear power plants has a major issue. They tend to run at high capacity, and they don’t handle cold snaps well if there’s a lot of electric heating (e.g. France, the US South and West.) So you end up having to import or have lots of peakers, which tend to be dirty.
Well we can build desalination plants and nukes to power them (each nuke costing a couple of billion dollars). Or we can stop growing rice on an arid plain.
Decisions, decisions.
I would skip it and go straight for the fusion plants, personally. Then you build some mines and farms right next to it, and a road network and next thing you know you are rolling tanks into Europe! After that it’s beer and asteroids…