You were the one who mentioned that desalination plants are huge cost and needs lots of electricity.
I've merely rebutted those excuses with logical answers.
California's GDP is $4.1 trillion. If it were a country, it would be world's 4th largest economy!
So its wealth can be directly compared to India, which is $4.5 trillion GDP and recently overtook Japan to become world's 4th largest economy.
Humanity has not yet found a better alternative to massive energy supply than nuclear reactors. Solar & windmill technology are getting better as well for energy tapping and efficiency.
But California's largest solar plant (~500 MW capacity) is shutting down in 2026, due to "high operating costs", and the other few solar farms in the state are smaller capacity farms.
Meanwhile, China and India have world's largest solar farms, and are building more. They also have huge wind farms, and are experimenting alternative new methods such as tidal-wave based energy generation.
China controls 11 of the top 15 largest solar farms globally, with the Gonghe Talatan Solar Park leading at 15.6 GW capacity – equivalent to Singapore’s entire land area and capable of powering millions of homes annually. capacity of the solar parks shall be 500 MW and above.
India's solar power installed capacity was 135.81 GW as of 31 December 2025, which will be tripled to 300 GW approximately by 2030. Indian government has mandated that new solar farms must be above 500MW capacity. (However, smaller parks are also considered where contiguous land may be difficult to acquire in view of difficult terrain and where there is acute shortage of non-agricultural land.)
California gets a lot of sunshine and wind, why doesn't it do the needful to resolve its water mismanagement by doing better in large-scale seawater-desalination and energy-generation/harvesting ?
The answer is obvious: because it doesn't want to.
California prefers to waste water because it is accustomed to bleeding other water-rich regions dry, and no one is bothered to bell the cat: to leverage California's immense wealth to permanently resolve its water woes by massive seawater-desalination projects and huge solar & wind farms supported by a nuclear reactor or two (yes, nuclear reactors are not eco-friendly, but they are only energy-rich solutions for massive energy needs; neither are solar or wind farms really evo-friendly as their broken equipments typically don't get recycled properly and end up in landfills.)
Past: I live in a large coastal city, which gets its energy mostly from a nuclear reactor, and few small-scale solar farms & wind farms. The city/district is also prone to droughts, but it gets its daily water from seawater desalination plants, couple of rivers, and some lakes as rain water catchment areas. The local government here also mandated rainwater harvesting to be done by every building (they catch rainwater on their roof terraces, it gets piped down to water dumps/tanks, and they use that water till it lasts.) The city/district take extra care to try not to lose precious rain water, so it manages drought seasons well. The city/district does NOT pipe its water from other regions, so nearby regions don't blame the city/district for bleeding then dry of their precious water.