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Drought: Feds cut water to Central Valley farmers
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2014 Feb 22, 6:03am 19,955 views 81 comments
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New Renter
2014 Aug 12, 10:50pm
"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.
Y
2014 Aug 12, 11:29pm
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
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.
Y
2014 Aug 12, 11:36pm
Wet winter coming to your door this year.
Drought expected to intensify and spread through western states and Texas.
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"growers in a region with the country's most productive soil said the loss of one of their chief water supplies won't be their problem alone: Consumers will be hit hard in the form of higher prices at the produce market."
When people think about buying real estate, they have tended to take water for granted, but that's a mistake. Texas, Nevada, Arizona, and now California all depend on scarce water. Even coastal cities will continue to depend on inland reservoirs until more desalination capacity goes online.
It's one of those potential crises that people tend not to pay attention to until too late. If you look at Roman history, the ultimate obvious final reason why the city fell was because the aqueducts were knocked down. Without adequate water, people fled, and the city's population dropped 99%.
#housing