Posted on 05/22/2015 1:08:58 PM PDT by Brad from Tennessee
From a distance, the reservoir appears topped by a flotilla of rubber duckies.
On closer inspection, the water’s surface is packed with thousands of free-floating, 13-inch plastic balls, clustered to form an undulating cover.
Developed by the Israeli startup Neotop (formerly known as Top-It-Up), the mass of balls serves as a floating cooling tower, reducing surface temperatures, algae and evaporation up to 95 percent. It’s one of many potential water-saving solutions to come out of Israel’s high-tech dream factory.
This could make a difference in California. With the state’s reservoirs at historic lows — the two biggest, Shasta Lake and Lake Oroville, both down 40 percent — every drop counts.
Living in a land of permanent water scarcity, Israelis grow up with a credo of water conservation. The country pioneered drip irrigation and wastewater recycling. As California bakes in its fourth year of exceptional drought — the worst stretch in 1,200 years — Israel has much to offer by way of remedies.
Sectors of California’s agriculture industry, such as grape growers, long ago took up Israeli-style drip irrigation. And this fall, the largest ocean desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere, a project designed and being built by IDE Technologies of Israel, is set to open near San Diego. . .
(Excerpt) Read more at jweekly.com ...
It’s a good idea - but liberals run California and liberals won’t accept help from Israel.
Now, let me get this straight, the money that the California government spent and are spending on “SPEED TRAINS TO NO WHERE” was better spent on that instead of desalination? While the state was promoting “GREEN REVOLUTION” couldn’t they use those SOLAR PANELS to desalinate the water? They are spending millions of dollars in putting solar panels on hundreds of acres of usable land, instead of using the same panels to desalinate water. Fine use nuclear or solar panels or wind, really doesn’t matter. Israel seems to be doing just fine in using whatever they need to use to desalinate water, and they seem to be winning.
“Almost everyday, I use Waze to navigate my way to work and back”
You’d think that after a while you could remember the route. ;)
“liberals won’t accept help from Israel”
Certainly not if the BDS students at their unis have anything to say about it.
“They are spending millions of dollars in putting solar panels on hundreds of acres of usable land, instead of using the same panels to desalinate water. Fine use nuclear or solar panels or wind, really doesn’t matter. Israel seems to be doing just fine in using whatever they need to use to desalinate water, and they seem to be winning.”
I guess you don’t understand the energy needs for desalinization, or the relative populations of Israel and California (8 million vs. 40 million). The RATS and the environmentalists have their heads up their a$$es. And so your notion that we could “power” desal plants with solar is a fools mission. One of our “solar” power plants covers 5,000 acres and produces less energy than a fossil fueled plant that covers less than 40 acres. There isn’t enough land available to make solar power, with today’s technology, economical. Yeah, you can bootstrap your home energy needs with solar panels, but they can’t supply enough energy to run anything more than a few lights. Plus they get dirty and need to be washed periodically and over their lifetime, they lose a significant percentage of their ability to produce electricity. I am not saying that solar doesn’t have a place, but rather that for our industrial requirements, they just don’t have the capacity to meet our needs. Nuclear generated electricity is produced at a tenth the cost of fossil fueled facilities. We have blown it with all this nonsense that these plants are bombs!
Apparently you didn’t get the gist of what I was saying. Had they put that money that they have and are spending on “SPEED TRAINS TO NO WHERE” that money could have been spent on desalinating. Who knows how far they could have gone, and besides that the people of California wouldn’t be on the hook for all those “SPEED TRAINS TO NO WHERE”. What would rather have, living in California, a desalinating plant or a “SPEED TRAIN TO NO WHERE”?
Your original post to me was about solar being the “solution” to making desalinization practical. I am in complete agreement with you with respect to the “train to nowhere.” This nonsense is Brown’s Wet Dream. He thinks it’s his legacy. It isn’t going to happen, but he will manage to pi$$ away a bunch of money to his trade union buddies before it goes under. Unfortunately, there is no solution at present for the current drought. Mother nature will fix it short-term before the RATs will lift a finger. It’s like the national RATS every time the Arabs perform “scrotal torsion” on us in the form of cutting off our oil supply or driving the prices sky high. Their game is always “well yes, we could have done that ten years ago, but now it’s too late so get yourself a golf cart to drive.” It will take years to build the necessary infrastructure to insure our population has enough water, and that’s not just a California problem. Instead of a high-speed rail, we should be figuring out if there are ways to move water around to cover local adverse conditions, developing desal technology so it’s less energy intensive, and building a bunch of storage facilities to hold more than we need.
Now, we are on the same page. Brown’s wet dream of “SPEED TRAINS TO NO WHERE”, while the EPA’s wet dream of allowing water to drain out to the Pacific, to protect the minnows in the California rivers, has put every one in California in a terrible bind. Unless and until some one in that state decides they are being screwed by their government, absolutely nothing will happen
“Unless and until some one in that state decides they are being screwed by their government, absolutely nothing will happen.”
Unfortunately, your “they” in my case is “me.” In my lifetime, this state has gone from #1 in the entire nation to the bottom of the list in very nearly any category you choose. And that slide has had Jerry Brown at the helm, following in his worthless father’s footsteps, and being “interrupted” by Gray Davis ( the guy we finally voted out of office and replaced with Arnold the Awful). Those three men have the bulk of the blood on their hands for what has happened here. And don’t get me started on Arnold. His only “accomplishment” was to father a bastard child with his Mexican maid. Our problem is, like most of the rest of the country, our worthless population centers. Get away from The Coast, and you find everyone agrees that things are really Effed up.
If every hotel that I’ve stayed in in America in the past two decades has water saver shower heads, either required by law, or to save money on their water bill, and had lousy water flow, and every shower on an eight day tour of Israel had more than adequate water flow, I think my anecdotes work.
Even our Israeli tour guide was perplexed at the water flow in our hotels’ showers.
If a shower head restricts the water flow as a misguided water saving measure, or a more rational attempt to save money, there will be less water coming out of the shower.
Well, when a customer complains to me about her shower head, or I notice that it has inadequate flow, I just replace it with a low flow shower head that works, then she looks at it and says that’s wonderful and pays me.
I’ll bet that the water starved Israelis, with their obsession with water saving and efficiency, also uses low flow shower heads in their hotels.
I assure you, it’s not my imagination. When I got a new shower head, and the water trickled out of it, I took it off, and drilled out the hole, and got a greater flow of water.
All the older shower heads in my buildings have great water flow. All the newer ones, mere trickles.
I never said anything about imagination, when a customer complains that their shower head doesn’t work well, I put in one that does.
Shower heads vary greatly in quality.
Some localities require water saving showerheads. I think the EPA does. Some hotels use them to save money, while claiming to be saving the planet. How would they save water without restricting the water flow?
The shower head regulations are federal, and became law almost a quarter century ago.
If your shower head is trickling, then you have a shower head that isn’t working well, and you should replace with one that does, it is what I do for my customers.
I have replaced a lot of showerheads and they are not all defective. It was a plumber who told me about widening the hole. The only shower heads that work right are either old or drilled out
Youre being deliberately contrary.
No, I’m a plumbing contractor, and I do this for a living.
Low flow shower heads became the law in 1992.
Is is legal to drill them out in the privacy of my home or office?
Low flow, to me, means that less water gets through it, and it takes longer to rinse of, using just as much water as the non-low flow shower heads.
You seem determined to be miserable.
I have my choice of shower heads, including all the old ones that anyone could want, taken from all kinds of homes (and scrapped), and I have fine showers with my normal low flow shower heads, and have for decades.
Good luck with your misery, you sure work hard enough to maintain it.
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