Not solvable at scale right now. Especially with climate change impacts folded in—and remember, the whole reason we're in this mess is because of the climate change impacts we are already experiencing. Those are going to get a lot worse.
Why not? Our electric utilities complain about nonuniform load. Isn't a desalination plant an excellent variable load given that its product would get dumped into reservoirs? You could totally flatten the duck curve if you wanted.
The problem isn't that we can't build _one_ desalination plant: we totally can, and in a reasonable time frame even. It's that a single plant is not enough for the scale of the problem. A decent size desalination plant can produce 50 million gallons of water a day, with the average household in California using about 50 gallons a way. So that's only a million households covered sorted. And while it'd be tempting to say "we're not replacing the Colorado watershed, we just want to supplement it", there is literally nothing left to supplement, that thing's running completely dry, fast.
So: there's about 13 million households in California alone, clearly we'd need at least 10 desalination plants: there is no way we can make that happen in less than several decades, with the main problem being the very thing we're trying to address: there is flat out not enough time to perform the necessary environmental impact assessment associated with building that many desalination plants all at the same time. Solving the fresh water shortage by destroying the entire western sea board would be insanity.
So yes: absolutely, let's build a desalination plant, it'll help la bit, just like forcing people to use less water will, but once it's up it's going to take a few decades before we can properly assess what damage it does (if any) to both the local environment and those directly connected through both static and tidal currents, before we can build another one.
It costs a fraction of a penny per gallon! I'm tempted to just call you a liar, but maybe there's some huge problem nobody has ever mentioned? And no, brine release is not that hard if you spend slightly more than the bare minimum.
Scale is not about money alone. Building one of them: entirely doable. And can be started on today, let's go!
But we don't need one, we'd need 10+ of them just for California alone, and there is literally no way to perform all the environmental impact studies necessary to determine that building 10+ desalination plants along the coast all at the same time wouldn't just make the problem exponentially worse. You know what would be insanely stupid? Creating just enough fresh water for a single state to cope, but at the cost of destroying the entire western sea board ecosystem, affecting all pacific states, Canada, Mexico, and a good part of Central and South America, too.
Ten is a tiny number and you can do an analysis of similar quality to a smaller setup. I really don't understand your argument here.
If you put the pipes far out then that's so so so much ocean involved to get a river's worth of water. The right design could even reduce the salinity near shore as runoff increases (or trivially counteract that, of course).
Have you done ten seconds of research about this yet? You should find time for that. Would clear up a lot of things for you.
Short version: we are far, far too late to start building infrastructure now and make up for a Colorado River's worth of water, and desalination tech right now uses a LOT of energy. Which exacerbates all the climate issues that are causing this to begin with.
Were you asleep for the last 40 years while this was all being discussed?
> Have you done ten seconds of research about this yet? You should find time for that. Would clear up a lot of things for you.
Point me to whatever source you think supports your argument that it can't be done.
> Short version: we are far, far too late to start building infrastructure now and make up for a Colorado River's worth of water,
We're going to need water forever. It's never too late.
> and desalination tech right now uses a LOT of energy. Which exacerbates all the climate issues that are causing this to begin with.
So build power plants that don't release carbon. If you want to get really particular, sell the water at a price that lets you build 2x as many power plants as you need, so even after considering construction costs you're reducing the net CO2 output.
But also, what are you talking about when you say it's not solvable or buildable? Adding 50% more water to the residential supply would be 3 million acre-feet, which would take 15-30 terawatt hours of power each year. California already uses 260TWh. That's very obviously feasible.
