81–90 of 195 posts
Everyone keeps saying desalination is the solution but doesn't desalination cause an enormous amount of waste output (hyper saline slurry)? It seems like creating a new problem to solve another.
Quick Google stats: There are 13M households in California. Average household consumes 0.5-1.0 acre-feet of water per year. It costs $419 per acre-foot for desalination. California has a discretionary budget surplus of $49B. Thus: It would cost $2.7B-$5.4B per year to provide desalination-based water to all Californians. With the current budget surplus, we could provide 100% of California's living water needs for 10-…
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% m…
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.
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Oh the typical techie solution to environmental problems. We can solve this with tech! Wait until the aquifers under North America run dry. That's where most irrigation pump up their ground water from. A few dry rivers and smaller lakes are nothing compared to what's going to happen. Forget your desalination plants. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aquifers_in_the_United... And it's entirely predictable. In fact…
> Oh the typical techie solution to environmental problems. We can solve this with tech! In this case, yes, we literally can solve this with tech. We don't have to wait for the aquifers to dry up, because California has a ludicrously long coastline just begging for desalination plants up the wazoo.
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Well, what are the alternatives? In reality, we will need a plurality of solutions, coming from tech and policy. Also, this is a website that has a glut of techies, so expect tech-based solutions to be suggested!
> Well, what are the alternatives? The same as with any resource that you are overusing: Use less. You don't need golf courses in the middle of the desert. You don't need broken water access rights regulation that encourages wasting water. You can reduce water use in agriculture to a tiny fraction if you'd start viewing water as a precious resource and do this smarter. There is a lot you can do that's different from…
Everyone keeps saying desalination is the solution but doesn't desalination cause an enormous amount of waste output (hyper saline slurry)? It seems like creating a new problem to solve another.
The "water crisis" in California is an entirely political problem.
Quick Google stats: There are 13M households in California. Average household consumes 0.5-1.0 acre-feet of water per year. It costs $419 per acre-foot for desalination. California has a discretionary budget surplus of $49B. Thus: It would cost $2.7B-$5.4B per year to provide desalination-based water to all Californians. With the current budget surplus, we could provide 100% of California's living water needs for 10-…
I admit I’m not familiar with current techniques for desalination at scale, but I’m curious what the energy requirements would be?
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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.
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.