It's 2024 and drought is optional(asteriskmag.com) |
It's 2024 and drought is optional(asteriskmag.com) |
Given that California electricity is pretty expensive even though we have lots of solar energy, how can that be done? Why not sell it to the grid?
It might help to know that the author of the article is the founder of Terraform Industries, which aims to use solar power to synthesize natural gas. Likely the hope is to get efficiency by closely integrating the solar panels with the desalination plant, similar to how they do it in that project.
I think if they really can get cheap desalination, there are many cities that would buy the water and pay more than agriculture. It wouldn't make sense to tackle agricultural use first, since it's more price-sensitive.
Look at wholesale prices of electricity on the grid, and it's really small.
High prices in California are due to PG&E not maintaining the grid and causing massive amounts of damages, which everybody else pays for. Or something. It's really hard to find out why our transmission and distribution prices are so high. And for that matter, generation costs on bills are super high despite people usually getting much cheaper generation prices if they have a Community Choice option that procures their own renewable generation.
In any case, if the desalination project was funded by their own off grid generation they'd have really cheap electricity.
I pay about $0.0136 / gallon so almost 10x the cost of producing.
Seems like (for non-agricultural use) we will be able to afford desalination -- I guess the real issue will be agricultural uses which are predicated on free water.
One (there are several) problem with desalination is that it often has to compete with free.
In many parts of North America the water is actually free. Like New York City-- their water falls from the sky in upstate NY, for free, into reservoirs that are not free to maintain to be distributed by colossal public works projects which are 100% not free.
Pumping water, desalinated or not, to your house is not free.
Whoever is charging you $0.0136/gal for water may indeed (especially if you don't live in an arid region with strange water rights laws) be charging you $0.0136/gal to pump water to your house and $0.0000/gal for the actual water.
If they switch to a desalinated source it is highly likely they will charge you $0.0136/gal + ≥$0.0010/gal = ≥$0.0146/gal.
Of course, if you live near a source of salt water you can cut out the middleman and, after massive up-front capital outlays, desalinate your own water for ≥$0.001/gal assuming you live long enough to recoup the cost of the initial expense.
https://www.wired.com/story/desalination-is-booming-but-what...
Those have to go someplace as well, and they would be mixed into that brine. Dumping a more concentrated version of that sludge into the gulf sounds like a bad time for people who live in the gulf region.
Don't get me wrong, I love this idea. I just know that there are hidden externalities here which need to be examined and dealt with properly.
The article also mentions that inefficient thermal desal produces much more brine, with modern RO desal being more efficient.
Existing ocean currents in the Gulf of California driven by wind, tides, and thermohaline circulation are on the order of 10cm/s, tens of kilometers wide, hundreds of meters deep. Very little of that is associated with local rivers, which are relatively tiny because the whole region is extremely arid. Are you going to be desalinating 0.1 km^2 of water per second?
The Sun pumps a thousand watts a square meter onto the surface of the Earth on a 24-hour cycle and this tends to shake things up.
- if a RE developer tried to do it for profit, they’d get shut down - ironically probably by environmental groups
- govt doesn’t actually build anything audacious anymore
Unless I’m missing something?
Perhaps I missed a zero somewhere, but 5MAF/yr would require pumping 6,900cfs of water to/from the gulf with 230+ft of head. We're going to need a bigger boat.
It's been used in Dubai, the middle of the desert, to create fake rain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding#cite_ref-8). It's been used in some US states (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/eight-states-are-...).
Though it's effectiveness is debated and it cannot guarantee precipitation. It also has environmental impacts, possibly decreasing precipitation in other areas as well as causing health issues (it basically involves spreading salt or dry ice into the air).
I can envision a world in which wars are fought over this kind of behavior.
Sacramento, a virtual desert, is surrounded by rice fields, with huge exports to Japan.
Effectively California’s farmers are selling its water to other places in the form of produce.
1. Increasing freshwater production along the coast.
2. Increasing freshwater distribution to Southwest regions.
3. Increasing stormwater drainage to prepare for more intense storms. This includes identifying and remediating areas of so-called "100 year" flood plains that put lives and property at risk.
4. Increasing freshwater storage capacity to prepare for longer droughts and lower rainfall.
When did LA become a city of 26 million?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-24/australias-population...
How can that be true.
That's over three million acres.
Really?
We've gone from ~200 GW installed per year to ~400 GW per year.
The India mega solar farm [2] is quoted as designed to deliver 30 GW from 72,600 hectares (179,398.5 acres).
Sanity checking ( 437 / 30 ) x 179,398 gives 2.6 million acres.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gujarat_Hybrid_Renewable_Energ...
Despite the "everything in Texas is bigger" motto, worldwide 3 million doesn't sound too far fetched if a single install in Texas is already 4,000 acres.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-01/lbnl_ieee...
It's about equivalent to a single larger US county (but well down the list from largest).
Meanwhile, numbers in solar always seem to exceed estimates, see for example this veteran forecaster joking about the 1TW/year deployment mark:
> Reasons solar industry analysts don't want to forecast that a terawatt gets built in a year, ever:
> - axis on chart doesn't go that high
> - makes wind industry feel bad
> - can't find markets to put it all in without the number being clearly ridiculous for that specific market
A similar event happened in Nebraska last year (I think). They got the plant back up and running in roughly six months, which is quite the feat given the amount of labor disposing and installing new panels involves.
Then again, six months is a very long time for a plant to be producing no power at all. Keeping these plants spread out will increase the odds of outages but will be necessary for them to become critical infrastructure.
Los Angeles is a city of about 3.9M. LA County is well, apparently experiencing some population decline because last I checked this was a little over 11M, but apparently as of 2023 is around 9.6M. If you count all the urban areas that touch, are surrounded by or very very close by without driving out into the bloody desert, “greater” LA, 18.4M is probably a reasonably close figure. Some of what’s on Wikipedia’s map is a stretch though. The further East you go, the more rural California gets until you’re either in Clark County or Arizona.
San Diego though is by no means part of that. It’s a large city in its own right and going downtown to downtown, you’re talking at least between 2 and 2.5 hours driving. You can also just fly, on a regular commercial airline.
The Los Angeles Conurbation is about to swallow the northern Imperial Valley as well, because the I-10 corridor is made up of flat sandy dirt that could be a suburban back yard.
2 hours driving, in the US, is a natural distance for complementary but distinct cities to form. NYC/Philly/DC, SF/San Jose, LA/SD.
Megapolis is the correct term.
Either way, we've got enough people to invade Australia and no Kokoda Trail is going to help them this time! We must get a plan to Gavin Newsom’s desk at once. The Koala mines will be ours!
It's all true! We've even planted counter intell to misdirect!
https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/science-envir...