They'd have enough salt to last forver
And the other good news with California sucking out all the seawater it will counteract the rising sea levels....
Posted on 08/02/2014 9:28:49 AM PDT by grundle
Full title: California Sand Fire: Desalination Plants May Be State’s Only Solution Despite Environmental, Energy Concerns
One of the solutions could be something parts of the Middle East began adopting decades ago: desalination plants, an energy-intensive process of converting seawater into drinking water.
Meeting California’s water needs might not help combat the effect of global warming, but an ample supply of water would at least help keep back the dry conditions from around residential communities, and it would help the state’s massive agricultural industry meet its own water needs.
Currently California is building the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere in Carlsbad. At a cost of $1 billion, the plant will produce 50 million gallons a day for San Diego County by 2016. The plant, and others like it in California, use reverse osmosis technology, which uses less energy than the thermal desalination process of evaporating and re-condensing seawater. Fourteen other desalination plants are in the works. Critics say the process is too costly.
"This [Carlsbad project] is going to be the pig that will try for years to find the right shade of lipstick," Marco Gonzalez, an attorney who sued on behalf of environmental groups that tried to halt construction, told the San Jose Mercury News last month. "This project will show that the water is just too expensive."
“As the cost of imported water is on the rise and technological advances are bringing down the cost of converting seawater into potable water, desalination has become the only truly drought-proof process to deliver a new source of clean, safe, high-quality water in a cost-effective and environmentally sound way,” Allan Zaremberg, president and CEO of the California Chamber of Commerce, wrote in a letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Times recently.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibtimes.com ...
Unfortunately, for the people in California, these plants use ELECTRICITY, so they are NON-STARTERS.
...but then these SAME PEOPLE voted for the SAME PEOPLE that will not allow them to have electricity.
So it’s hard to feel sorry for them.
As soon as I read “global warming” I stopped reading the article and skipped down to the comments.
“Desalinization isn’t cheap and it is energy intensive. And you need to build the infrastructure to distribute the water. The taxpayer/consumer will face a larger bite in an already overtaxed state. And I wonder how agriculture will deal with the increased costs of doing business.”
If they just let water be owned privately and let the market bid the price, this would all take care of itself in about 10-15 years. Agriculture and businesses would adapt to more expensive water; homeowners would too. Conservation would skyrocket and new ways of producing and transporting water to people willing to pay would emerge.
Everywhere I go I see people drinking water from plastic bottles at a cost of what, $5 a gallon or higher? Drinking $6 coffees from Starbucks. We’ve got enough money for desalinization plants and then some.
Do the rat controlled state of CA want water to drink or do they want
to protect the green eyed grasshopper?.
My guess is that they will choose water.
They haven’t figured that out yet? With all their sun, and proximity to the ocean, they should be turning seawater into drinking water.
i don’t know why the desal plant is Santa Barbara is taken out of moth balls and fired up
It’s the envirowhackos that are to blame.
Indeed. And if there was wise opposition that opposition would be claiming that unbridled immigration is a threat to the environment and we’d be pushing the whackos to start lawsuits to block it.
Where does the money come from? Are those people with the plastic bottles of water going to stop drinking bottled water? Water is a necessity. The government will control it and dictate how it is used. It will only be a matter of time before we have the water police.
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Probably the same bunch that decried the San Onofre Nuclear plant that would "kill all the sea life" with its warm water output. Turned out it generated plankton which brought in the anchovies which brought in . . .
Admittedly solar power along the coast might be a bit iffy but there is plenty of wind; of coast the swells living at the beaches won’t appreciate the windmills.
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