patrick.net

Drought expected to intensify and spread through western states and Texas.

curious2 says

In America, we take for granted a vast but aging infrastructure that makes "free" water appear cheap compared to desalination

Desalination plants are problematic because they are not free to build, and then maintain during long stretches of non-scarcity (consider Santa Barbara's long-mothballed desal plant as an example - nothing but a headache, even in as water-insecure a town as Santa Barbara). You have to go big or go home - full-time desalination or none at all.

If things ever get really grotesque, consumers will be asked to pay much higher rates for water, which will cut consumption by a large amount instantaneously. And then, maybe, desal will take root in the coastal cities.

I guess you're thinking of putting large coastal cities on desalination completely, which probably makes sense in the long term, but we're the anti-Switzerland. The Swiss are willing to spend the cash to tunnel through the Alps, even though it won't be recouped (in lower travel energy expenditure) for 100 years. Nobody in the United States is willing to spend money now which will not be recouped within 5 years.

So the transition costs bar the move to desalination.

"California staggers toward a third drought-plagued summer that will probably include rationing and lots of fighting about how the state should use its precious, dwindling supplies of water.

The snow levels in the Sierra were only 18 percent of average on Thursday, when the last of the season's once-a-month measurements was taken by the California Department of Water Resources. That's worse than last month, when the snowpack was 32 percent of normal for the date.
***
Conditions get worse the farther north one goes in the Sierra and Cascade ranges. The snowpack is a paltry 7 percent of average in the northern part of the state, according to the measurements."

Iosef V HydroCabron says

If things ever get really grotesque, consumers will be asked to pay much higher rates for water, which will cut consumption by a large amount instantaneously.

I thought $4/gallon gasoline would stop people buying SUVs, but it didn't. They simply borrow more against the quantitatively eased prices of their shacks.

I do see your point about Santa Barbara's maintenance costs, though I have to wonder about their decision to sell off some of their equipment. The main issue is, when a city needs water, it can't wait long enough to build something. We spend unlimited sums ("no lifetime caps!") on toxic SSRI placebos that end up polluting the water, then suddenly there is no money to ensure a safe supply of water that people need to drink every day in order to survive at all.

The article linked in this new thread goes into the math on San Diego's desalination plans. As the article notes, the cost of "free" piped water depends on how much of your allocation you actually receive. When you need the piped water most, i.e. when there is a drought, is likely to be when you get the least of it. As a result, the cost of desalinating can actually be less than the cost of "free" piped water, and desalinating enables coastal cities to have local control of their water instead of depending on remote allocation decisions that they don't control.

Update: "Depletion of Central Valley's groundwater may be causing earthquakes"

http://news.yahoo.com/desalination-could-solution-californias-drought-160735035.html
Desalination Could Be the Solution to California's Drought

One of the drawbacks of desalination is the enormous amount of energy it takes to turn salt water into fresh water. A potential solution has launched in the dry heat of California’s Central Valley, where a pilot project is using solar energy to operate a new kind of desal system.

In San Joaquin Valley’s Panoche water and drainage district, where the experimental solar desalination project is based, the water is brackish—less salty than the ocean, but still too salty to be easily used for agriculture. Plants that can handle brackish water, such as pistachios and wheatgrass, dot the landscape, watered by reclaimed runoff. Salts from the soils accumulate every time the water is reused, and eventually the water becomes too salty to be usable.

That’s where the new technology comes in. The salty stuff can now be turned into fresh water by a row of curved mirrors that bend the sun’s rays, focusing it on long tubes containing mineral oil. The heat from the oil generates steam, which separates water from the minerals and salts. Because heat can be held in a thermal storage unit, the system can also run at night or when the sun isn’t shining.

Sound simple? At its core, it is. “Basically, all we’re doing is boiling water,” explains Matt Stuber, cofounder of WaterFX, the company that created the technology. “We’re distilling the water, capturing the heat in the steam so we can reuse it in a very efficient manner.”

With fresh water becoming more and more scarce from Israel to Australia, desalination technologies are popping up everywhere. Most use reverse osmosis, which pushes water through a series of membranes to squeeze progressively more stuff out of the liquid. That takes a lot of energy, and only about half the water going in comes out clean. The remaining sludge is a super-salty mixture that often gets discharged back into the ocean, which can have deleterious effects. WaterFX’s technique, on the other hand, makes 93 gallons of clean water for every 100 gallons of brackish water coming in. The remaining material comes out as a solid cake of selenium and salts that can be used as filler in building projects or fertilizers, or purified and sold as sea salt.

Another problem with reverse osmosis is that it only works well near the ocean. “The water chemistry in groundwater is very different from seawater, and the chemistry happens to be predominantly the things that are contribute to technology failures—the worst things you ever want to deal with,” says Stuber. WaterFX’s system only uses about a third of the energy of a similarly sized reverse osmosis operation, which makes the price competitive, Stuber adds.

In California’s Central Valley, where roughly a third of American produce is grown each year, the prospects aren’t good. The region likely won’t receive any water deliveries this year through the federal irrigation program, and the historical record indicates the potential for droughts that last a century.

Even if the current drought were to end, the salinization of the soil from decades of intensive irrigation is making more and more of the Valley into marginal cropland—making Stuber’s technology a potential fix regardless of what the weather does.

WaterFX plans to expand. The current pilot project can put out about 11,000 gallons of fresh water per day. If all goes well, the company will build a larger plant capable of producing 2 million gallons of treated water per day, which Stuber claims is at the lower end of the scale. The plant design is modular, so it only takes about six months to build a new one.

Stuber says he’s seen a lot of interest throughout the Southwest to produce clean and sustainable water for agriculture in dry regions. Agriculture consumes about 80 percent of California’s water to produce just 3 percent of its economic output—a ratio residents aren’t likely to tolerate as growth and a changing climate diminish supply.

“Using oil and gas just isn’t an option to produce water,” Stuber says.

Here's another Great idea for California: Publicize (if that's a word) the Water.

I can't believe that California follows barbarous laws of one of the most backward nations in Europe* with water management instead of good Anglo-Saxon laws. Get rid of the private ownership of water.

I can't believe people can't canoe down some rivers, because those rivers are privately owned. What nonsense! Did the owner build a rain factory? Did he dig out a massive river with backhoes and an army of coolies?

* Although, "Europe ends at the Pyrenees." - Voltaire.

"California drought: S.F. poised to require water rationing"

Meanwhile in Israel, desalination is providing a growing share of drinking water, and wastewater is recycled for agricultural use.

curious2 says

"California drought: S.F. poised to require water rationing"

Meanwhile in Israel, desalination is providing a growing share of drinking water, and wastewater is recycled for agricultural use.

The plants require immense amounts of energy, consuming roughly 10 percent of Israel's total electricity production.

That's a lot of power! I can see solar photothermal desalination working in the central valley and sunnier parts of the state but coastal RO plants are going to be too expensive both in capital costs and power consumption.

Your arguments were good, up to your statement below.
Regardless of current capacity, it obviously is not enough to mitigate the current situation.
If we had double the capacity of what we have now, we would not be in a 'drought' situation as our reserves would be triple what they are now .
California currently has about 14.7 million acre-feet of storage capability.
out of that 7.5 million is actually stored, or about 50%.
with double storage capacity, we would have capacity of 29 million af, with 21.5 million af actually stored, 3x more reserves than we have now.

http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/reservoirs/RES

curious2 says

It was getting silly. California has already enormous reservoir capacity, in fact some environmentalists want to get rid of Hetch Hetchy, so the suggestion to build more reservoirs was the sort of click bait that is used by certain creatures that live under bridges.

Wet winter coming to your door this year.

http://liveweatherblogs.com/index.php/community/groups/viewdiscussion/637-california-winter-outlook-2013-2014-rainfall-for-2014-2015-snowfall-and-el-nino-blast?groupid=36

curious2 says

Drought expected to intensify and spread through western states and Texas.