I wonder how much one plant would cost, and how many homes is would support.
Funny thing is that CA doesn’t really have the power grid to support significant numbers of desalination plants.
Huge quantities of water are pumped under high pressure into large molecular filters in a process known as reverse-osmosis, a multi stage process which results in some fresh water - most of the slightly brinier water is returned to the sea. It should be regarded as more of a fresh water extraction process than a “conversion" process.
Another process uses evaporation - a partial distillation, which again produces a much smaller quantity of fresh water at the end than the quantity of salt water taken initially into the process.
The need for the return of salt water to the ocean is why de-sal plants are always located adjacent to the body of water providing the raw material.
De-sal plants can create relatively huge quantities of fresh water. It is only a question of scale and cost. Desalinated water is one to two orders of magnitude higher than natural water, but it is infinitely cheaper than abandoning billions of dollars of installed infrastructure.
They need a lot of power to operate and in my view can be integrated with nuclear power which can be optimized to provide the steady 24-7 power needed by desalinization. There ought to be a couple dozen under construction along the California coast right now.
Since there are none, it is almost certainly too late. Thank loads, anti nuke nutters.
The wacky Eco-terrorist will be sending millions of Californians out to the other states to destroy them. The Calis will leave because there no agua de beber and will recreate the California political system wherever they go. That’s why Colorado is not a Conservative state any more. In the East, of course, we have people escaping New York to pollute Florida and escaping Massachusetts to pollute New Hampshire. They can no longer stand to live in their own utopias so they leave to make new utopias elsewhere, always believing that is the crooked politicians and uncooperative Christians and the right wing crazies that ruined their own states.
They wouldn’t have it so bad if they hadn’t poured so much into the ocean for the sake of salmon and smelt.
Sending fresh water into the ocean for the sake of fish causes it to be lost. At least if it was given to farmers for the past few years, some of it would have seeped back into the water table.