[grundle]

Meanwhile, in the real world, there's this other article from McClatchy: Israel no longer worried about its water supply, thanks to desalination plants

[stillfree?]

Yeah, but we are building high speed rail!

[rbg81]

I saw a comment on a [real] blog comment along the lines of:

Desalination is bad because it KILLS FISH. California should just run out of water. If we die the fish will still be okay and that’s good.

[justlurking]

What's the percentage of water used by the urban areas (for drinking, washing, etc.) vs. the water used for agricultural irrigation?

Desalination requires power -- lots of it (although there has been some progress on that front). Is it cost effective to divert power to desalination to irrigate crops?

[doug from upland]

Problem with endless growth? I’m aboard. I want to lessen the population by about 5 million in California and send them to their homeland.

[Misterioso]

The sky continues to fall, especially here in California.

[Veto!]

I deleted the NYT from my bookmarks when they published Darren Wilson’s home address. Interesting to see that they are still idiots, but not surprising.

[justlurking]

Here we go:

https://www.watereuse.org/sites/default/files/u8/Power_consumption_white_paper.pdf

At the scale of 50 million gallons of water per day, desalination using reverse osmosis is about 10.4 kilowatt hours per 1000 gallons.

At our electric rate of 12.6 cents/kWh (which is much lower than California), that's $1.31 per 1000 gallons. That's acceptable for residential usage: we used 4,000 gallons last month, and that's an additional $5.24.

But what about agriculture irrigation? I wasn't able to find numbers specific for California in a quick search, but I was surprised at the result.

http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1405/

Public-water supply was #3 in 2010, at 14% of freshwater use.

Agricultural irrigation was #2 in 2010, at 38% of freshwater use.

The #1 use of freshwater, at 38% of freshwater and 45% of all water (including saline), was thermoelectric power generation

So one has to ask: how much additional freshwater will be needed by power-generation to desalinate a gallon of sea water?

[Two Kids' Dad]

Thanks for posting these articles. If the clowns in California government would work on de-sal instead of that high speed rail garbage we’d be much better off in the long run. But asking Sacramento to do anything right is an exercise in futility.

[Steve_Seattle]

Too much growth? Then deport the illegals. Or are they pushing for machine guns, mass graves, and bulldozers?

[Wolfie]

I look forward to California’s multi-billion/trillion dollar desalination program, and the howls of FReepers protesting big govt spending.