A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest

"We desperately need to find ways to massively change human nature, rather than using our vast combined expertise to engineer solutions that let human nature work for us rather than against us."

Any solution to a systemic problem that can be articulated as "If people would just..." is doomed to fail. People will not just. People will continue finding ways to convert resources into better lives—for better and for worse.

Posting on articles like this saying "No! We can't keep finding ways to make consumption not harm the ecosystem! We have to force people to live austere, monk-like lifestyles! Only that will truly save us all!"

Like, I'm as frustrated by the idiocy of growing almonds in California as the next guy, but if this solution will actually work the way it claims to, then we may not need to worry about that anymore. And furthermore, it would mean significant improvements for various other parts of the world currently reliant on transporting enormous quantities of fresh water long distances to coastal areas.

Mathematically, it’s easy to forget that the PV term in enthalpy is a mathematical trick, not a physical thing, and that it mostly does a nice job explaining physical things when P = atmospheric pressure.

If you want to store, say, 100psi water, the energy you care about is P times delta V, so you need some thing that can change its volume easily, cheaply, and reversibly while under pressure. As a practical matter, this means compressed air or maybe springs. So that water “pressure tank” is actually an air pressure tank that happens to have some water in it too.

There’s nothing wrong with storing pressurized air, except that it’s a heck of a lot more dangerous than storing pressurized water due to the fact that it really does have energy stored in it. (There’s a reason that a PVC pipe filled with 80psi water is a common thing in houses and the main danger is that water escapes if it breaks. A pipe full of 80 psi air is quite hazardous.) There are startups that have played with compressed air energy storage. The resulting gizmos are large.

I would expect a RO plant that is optimized for intermittent use without any energy storage at all to end up being a viable alternative to energy storage, but maybe batteries will end up being cheap enough that this isn’t worthwhile.

The thing about this plan that I love though, is that who cares if the desal plant runs at night? Desalination can take all of the power you can feed it and then some, and if it shuts off after sundown, who cares? Stop filling your freshwater reservoir until morning, at which point you just run flat out all over again.

Here's an alternative proposal based on a sea level canal and tidal power.

And it is only supposed to run during large scale flood events, which the report cites as lasting ~80 days, worst case? Looking at flood event frequency, this report cites: 1912, 1913, 1927, 1937, 1965, 1973, 1982, 1993, and 2008.

So, let's be generous and double the event length to 160 days and double the event frequency to ~20 per century (increasing, to be sure). That's a time utilization of the infrastructure of ~9%, if Ima doing the math right.

It is apparently true: water runs uphill toward money. In this case, literally multiple miles of vertical elevation gain to get it to the Navajo Nation.

I mean I could see maybe pumping to Denver, or maybe over the continental divide past Denver, but... direct to almost the NM, AZ border?

Maybe just start with baby steps and for instance charge those good enterprising folk who farm alfalfa with nearly free water in the AZ desert and ship it to Saudi Arabia.