Water in the Media – Shortages and Solutions

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Two articles of note you might want to check out – the first an op-ed from LA Times, the other an article from Scientific American magazine.

Something tells me many of you have already read the LA Times piece, but for those of your who haven’t:

It’s easy to understand why so many of us, hearing of threats from climate change and shrinking water supplies, turn our gaze west to the mighty Pacific. The Colorado River, a water source strained to its limits, once seemed endless. The ocean practically is endless. As Saudi Arabia and now Australia have shown, it is possible to remove the salt from ocean water and get perfectly decent — indeed, quite high-quality — drinking water.

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Because of strict development regulations on the coast, acquiring permits for desalination plants is a complicated and expensive process. Poseidon Resources Corp., a water infrastructure development company based in Stamford, Conn., has spent tens of millions of dollars and 10 years on a plant in Carlsbad that will produce 50 million gallons a day — and it hasn’t even broken ground. If the company gets final approval from the Coastal Commission on Aug. 6, it will spend at least $300 million more on capital costs before it produces its first drop of desalinated water, which won’t be before 2011.
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In the short term, desalinated water is unaffordable for Los Angeles — though it may make better economic sense as imported water becomes scarcer and pricier. In a place like San Diego County, which has few local water resources and depends almost entirely on imported water from the MWD and even more expensive supplies, desal makes a lot more sense. Hoping to lessen cities’ dependence on water from the delta and the Colorado, the MWD offers a $250-per-acre-foot subsidy for water districts for the purchase of desalinated water, which could make Poseidon’s Carlsbad water, for example, almost competitive with imported water (with the added bonus of being drought-proof and therefore dependable).
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But desalination is just one in a broad portfolio of technologies and strategies that California will have to employ to meet its water needs in the decades to come. Throughout the state — and especially in Los Angeles, where water is relatively cheap — conservation, wastewater recycling, storm water capture and other approaches must come first. Desalination isn’t some kind of magic that will allow us to continue sprinkling our sidewalks, hosing down our driveways and taking hourlong showers. Its modest promise cannot become an excuse to waste water. It must be a complement to conservation — not an alternative to it.

Read the entire piece here.

Keeping perspective

One of the things that caught my eye in the op/ed just points out how skewed the basis is for evaluating “shortage”. “an acre foot, or 326,000 gallons, is enough water to supply two families for one year.” Just so we can keep this in perspective, to use an acre foot in a year, each family would have to use 36 units every two months or 440 gallons per family per day. In reviewing the issue, most Americans outside California use somewhere around 100 gallons a day. Even Californian average somewhere closer to 150 gallons per person per day. I don’t know where the write got his information, but I dispute its validity in the real world. According to the CCSD, “most Cambrians” use 12 units bi-monthly. One acre-foot of water here is enough for six families. Drop the usage to 9 units per billing cycle and one acre-foot is enough for eight families.

Scientific American’s most recent issue has water as its cover story. “Facing the Freshwater Crisis” puts our water woes into a global perspective. The main thrust of this article is that the technologies already exist to solve the water shortages, we just have to have the political will to do what needs to be done. Read the article here.

Note: Articles about water often refer to water using all kinds of different units. It’s always bothered me and it makes it difficult to compare to my own use. Like in the Op-ed piece – I wanted to see if I use half an acre-foot of water a year….so I opened my handy-dandy water calculator/converter. You can download this excel calculator to convert and calculate acre-feet, gallons to liters, cubic meters to gallons, CCSD units to Acre-feet and much more. Get it in the AboutCambria.com Library.

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