Which water technology will save California from its long, dry death?

boing
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I am amazed at how much less water my greenhouse uses now it has drip irrigation and I plan to extend it to the rest of the garden over the winter. The article really needed a relative cost analysis between drip irrigation and desalination. An second advantage of drip, of course, is that far less salts are introduced into the soil.

But contrary to what is said above, socialism could be one answer. If the present system of rights was done away with and a program of looking at farms, looking at their water efficiency, and allocating water supplies to the most water efficient farms first rather than last, was to be followed, that might fix the problem most effectively. Don’t let farmers use water till they use it efficiently. (Of course you could say that isn’t socialism but just sound business planning - each year the board looks at competing projects and decides to fund the ones likely to have the best ROI).

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You should probably have written an article that sounds like less of an advertisement for desalinization plants and WaterFX in that case.

And petulance isn’t a good way to convince anyone you’re writing in good faith (most people will probably take it to mean the opposite). The good way is to demonstrate that you take the criticism seriously and explain why you wrote the article with the focus you did instead of spending more time on the critic’s concerns.

If you think you did that here, you’re wrong. You assert that desal is a good solution in some cases, whereas @bizmail_public asserts that it is in no way a good solution. You said very little about reclamation, and you did nothing like a cost benefit analysis to make your case.

This is why the article reads like an advertisement – it seems like uncritical endorsement of two particular technologies rather than a thorough analysis of the problem and the tradeoffs involved in the potential solutions.

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While I was at university some researchers were looking at the Persian system of qanats. This has now become quite a big area of research - they are found as far as Segovia in Spain and across the Middle East - and they enabled societies in arid areas to control irrigation and farm crops for over 2000 years. There is a long Wikipedia article for the interested.

It’s interesting, at least to me, that societies that many people assume were “primitive” or barbaric were actually able to develop very sophisticated methods of water control and irrigation that have stood the test of millennia, while an “advanced” society can’t get its act together and starts to look at very expensive technical solutions which have their own downsides (but not for hedge funds). But one simple reason may be the way that in the US there is (a) an obsession with property rights - which given that they are over land that was basically taken by fort main is a bit of a joke, and (b) a legal system which rewards the deepest pockets. In earlier societies the educated class would often have been more or less synonymous with the religious authorities, and “God wants us to do this” trumped - or should I say Trumped - greedy people.

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Oh, I never said it would come quickly. But there’s just not enough water to sustain the system, therefore, the system will change. Regulate agriculture to use less or the rain to fall as much as you want, but the environment is not sustainable for growing non-native foods like this.

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I’m reading about ancient Greece right now, and the author of the book I’m reading argues that the influence of the oracle at Delphi began to wane exactly when wealthy tyrants realized they could bribe the priests for oracles favorable to their desired policies. Maybe that’s just how civilizations roll – a common belief system allows for the coordination required to build everything up, and then free riders pop up everywhere to the point that everything starts to unravel.

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Obviously, I did not write the article you wanted to read. It is your prerogative to criticize where you see fit.

I am quite happy to discuss the content of my article. I am open to criticism. You went beyond that in your comment.

Yes, you are free to have your own opinions about a topic, but you don’t know me. So, don’t slander my name with baseless assumptions.

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I read your article thoroughly.

The fact is, we know how to handle our water situation just fine here in California using techniques – cultural, legal, and, yes, technological – already successfully deployed elsewhere. We agree – these changes won’t come easily – but it’s not some unknown that requires more research.

I would never claim you had a financial stake in the project. Lobbying Journalism doesn’t work like that.

As someone in the trenches fighting a HORRIBLE desal project in Huntington Beach, your piece – however well-intentioned – reads like the Lobbying Journalism we’ve been fighting. This is not a small issue: we’re being outspent by over 10,000 to 1.

Did you follow my two links? Because they make much clearer what you claim to be communicating: Desal is a last resort, and almost always unnecessary.

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What a strange phrasing. No one who isn’t clairvoyant ever knows the content of an article before they read it. The question isn’t so much whether you wrote an article I’d like to read as much as whether you wrote an article I’d like to recommend.

In this case, I would not recommend this article to anyone who wanted to understand the California water issues or potential solutions. I might recommend it to anyone who wanted to know about WaterFX’s concentrated solar technology, though I’d also want to recommend they look at articles critical of or adversarial to WaterFX for the sake of balance since this article was simply an uncritical profile of that company once you get through the California water emergency window dressing.

I’m not sure whether you’re mistaking me for @bizmail_public, or referring to my own comments. “Slander” is a rather serious accusation, and I’m rather curious which remarks in particular to which you’re referring.

Was it that I accused you of petulance? Obviously a statement of opinion and not slander in any way.

Was it that I said the article reads like an advertisement? Again, obviously opinion and not actionable as slander.

Was it @bizmail_public’s suggestion that you might have some financial incentive for having written the article? I don’t think it’s slander to wonder aloud something like that. We all know that the internet is a clearinghouse for paid advertisements and propaganda in disguise as informational articles. We all have to maintain a certain amount of informational hygiene by being skeptical of the sources of informational articles as a result. I think the best way to deal with such suspicions is to meet them head-on; accusing skeptics of “slander” seems like an intimidation or silencing tactic, and is likely to only reinforce the impression that the writer has ulterior motives.

(Also, I think you meant “libel”.)

It is exactly that we don’t know you that we are obligated to ourselves to be skeptical of your article and your motives for writing it. Certainly you wouldn’t maintain we should just believe everything we read, or never consider the possibility that the authors might have ulterior motives, would you?

At any rate, I’m sorry I’ve upset you enough that you’re throwing around accusations of “slander”. I’ll leave you alone now.

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You are obviously well-informed and passionate about this issue. All the other options you list should be top priorities for local water district conservation plans, and you might be right that desal is a terrible, expensive solution for LA… if the drought ends. Which, it might if it’s a big enough El Nino this year. But, if we are in for 50 years of dryness, something needs to be done for the state as a whole, not just LA.

Agricultural wastewater is a big issue for the state, and reclaiming that water would play a productive part in making more water available for use statewide. WaterFX is recycling agricultural wastewater using solar powered desalination via distillation. It’s nowhere close to the expensive desal you’re looking at in Huntington Beach.

My article was about technological solutions, not political. I stand by my assertion that I did not “make a case for desalination”, other than the potential for what WaterFx is doing. We can agree to disagree on that point. I agree with you that money plays a huge role in many of the decisions that are being made, and not for the better. I was not paid by a hedge fund or anyone involved in the technologies I wrote about for this article. I still resent the question, as it was fallacious in nature and unnecessary, although I do understand your position more clearly now.

Thank you for those links, as they are very clear in their position and purpose, and also quite different from the article I wrote. Keep fighting the good fight. We need people all over California involved in water’s future.

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Of course not, but people do have preconceived opinions and biases that are emotionally flavored, and set them up to respond unconsciously to things they see, read, and hear.

I do apologize. I did conflate your two replies, and accidentally replied to you both as one. It was @bizmail_public’s question that I referred to as slanderous (considering this forum a conversation rather than the written format it is). Your comment about petulance of course was just opinion.

You wonder whether this was a “silencing tactic” on my part when I wondered the same about the question. The question was worded in such a way as to come across as “wondering aloud”, but instead seemed to be trying to discredit anything I had to say on the subject by associating me without any basis in fact with journalists who could be linked to this unnamed hedge fund.

Yes, you should be skeptical. Fine, you don’t think my article went into enough detail. But, questioning my character in such a way in a public forum is a different story.

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Palin has the right ideas. Up there in Alaska is a lot of frozen fresh water, and Republican policies would ensure that it gets melted.
It’s a pity Greenland is on the wrong side of the continent, when all that white stuff melts it is going to go to waste cooling the Atlantic, instead of watering golf courses in AZ.

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I didn’t wonder, actually; I was firmly of the opinion that you did not intend it as such. I should have been clearer that I was guessing about how others might view it.

I agree that it was phrased very much in the “just asking questions” tradition. Nonetheless, I’m sympathetic to @bizmail_public’s skepticism. Since the initial comment, I think @bizmail_public has disclosed a few more details about their experience with this issue that make it clear why they were primed to react negatively to a piece of press like your OP, and you seem to have reached some degree of rapprochement with @bizmail_public so enough said about that.

I absolutely accept (and very much appreciate!) this apology. I apologize to you for being rather brusque and uncharitable in my initial comment.

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This statement is false.

you might be right that desal is a terrible, expensive solution for LA… if the drought ends.

California can manage its water needs [] whether or not the drought ends [] California has a water policy problem not water supply problem. []

This next statement is so deeply misleading as to essentially be false.

Donnelly went on to explain that farmers pay $100-200 per acre foot whereas urban areas are charged upwards of $1000-2000 for the same amount of water.

The MWD just secured 17,000 acre-feet/year of new supply from an agricultural source at a cost of roughly $700/acre-foot. One of the most expensive recent farm-to-city deals was San Diego County Water Authority’s acquisition of 100,000 acre-feet/year from the Imperial Irrigation District, which was priced at $1,048 per acre-foot.

While technically true — 1,048 is greater than 1,000 and less than 2,000 – Donnelly’s statement is profoundly misleading.

but there’s more.

You suggest the desal will get cheaper. maybe. but that’ hasn’t been the experience thus far. When the Carlsbad and Huntington Beach desal plants were first proposed, the claimed costs were about $1,000 / acre-foot (the numbers were never very solid). The actual cost water Carlsbad’s plant when it comes online this fall? Over $2,200/acre-foot (note: the official rate is about $1,850, but that’s due to accounting gimmickry and moving a tenth of the cost of the project into a different accounting category). So yeah, I’m suspicious that your BrandName method will deliver.

In fact, I’m more than a little suspicious. I am downright skeptical. A simple engineering fact:

the WaterFX Aqua4 system does not scale

It’s essentially a distillation process, which means a fixed amount of heat must be introduced for each unit of water produced. That heat comes from solar collection. More water production means a proportionate increase in the area of solar collectors. It’s a straight linear relation – no scale benefit. So this will never be more than a niche technology.

But does it make sense for niche water production? Let’s do the math. From the article, 70 acres will produce 5,000 acre-feet/year. Covering that same 70 acres with photovoltaics would produce about $6 million/yr in electric power. (assuming assuming $0.25/kW-hour). So each acre-foot of water produced represents $1,250 in foregone electric power revenue.

That’s some expensive water.

But it gets worse. From the article.

The process is able to reclaim 93% of the drainage water that enters the system as freshwater, while simultaneously producing the brine “co-product”.

Go read the Poseidon’s own EIRs for the Carlsbad and Huntington Beach projects: That brine isn’t “co-product”.

The co-produced brine is an industrial waste that requires treatment and/or disposal.

This being the central valley, I presume they will dispose of that waste the same way the oil companies dispose of their brine “co-products”: deep injection wells.

So yes, I read your article. The article said wonderful things about one company’s product, even though the claims seemed problematic upon close examination and vital contextual information was deeply flawed.

Meanwhile, you’ve helped reinforce some deeply flawed but generally held beliefs about California’s water needs. Whether or not you intended to, you’ve helped the hedge funders trying to foist a Billion Dollar White Elephant on my citizens.

Please try a little harder on your next effort.

[*] one small example: MWD is in good shape for this year and next year. They have 1.3 million acre feet in storage plus 400,000 AF emergency supply in Diamond Valley Lake, as per their public presentation last Tuesday before MWDOC.

[**] Indeed, this drought may not end. I suggest Laura Ingram’s The West without Water.

[***] Many groups have concrete, detailed proposals. My preferred is a recent Wood’s Institute for the Environment Report, pdf but there many other great ones.

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They say 6 gallons a day per plant? That’s 27 litres.
This figure sounds very inflated, even for hydroponic.
Are they water-cooling their lighting rig or something?

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Don’t ask me, how much water do you use on your, ah, crop?

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