Tag Archive for: California water infrastructure

California Can Solve the Colorado Water Deficit

I was a dam builder
Across the river deep and wide
Where steel and water did collide
A place called Boulder on the wild Colorado
The Highwayman, lyrics by Jimmy Webb

When the Hoover Dam was completed in 1935 it was the largest dam in the world, creating what was to become the largest reservoir in the world, Lake Mead. It took six years to fill, but at capacity Lake Mead held 28 million acre-feet (MAF) of water. Mead’s upstream counterpart, Lake Powell, created by the Glen Canyon Dam and completed in 1963, delivered an additional 25 MAF of storage capacity.

These massive dams bottled up some of the last downstream extremities of the Colorado River watershed, where mountainous topography permits large reservoirs. The Colorado River, 1,400 miles in length, drains a whopping 250,000 miles of watershed. Its tributaries extend eastward through Arizona and New Mexico into headwaters in the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado, and north through Utah and Colorado up to headwaters in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming. Access to the water stored in these giant reservoirs made possible the growth of cities and agriculture from the California coast all the way to Tucson in southeast Arizona. Las Vegas and Phoenix would not exist if it weren’t for these dams, nor would nearly 500,000 acres of rich irrigated farmland in California’s Imperial Valley along the border with Mexico.

Today the benefits of Lake Mead and Lake Powell are imperiled. For the first time since these reservoirs were built nearly a century ago, the relentlessly escalating quantity of water demanded by the cities and farms of the Southwest, combined with years of drought, have brought the levels of remaining water to dangerous and unprecedented lows. As of mid January 2023, only 7.4 MAF remains in Lake Mead, and only 5.6 MAF remains in Lake Powell. These trends are alarming.

For the last several years, far more water has been withdrawn from these reservoirs than was recharged by river flow. Measuring the flow of river water reaching the lower Colorado each year offers clarity on just how much has changed on the supply side. When these dams were built, and well into the 1980s, the average annual flow of the lower Colorado was over 20 MAF per year. An authoritative study conducted by the Department of the Interior in 2012 calculated that the average annual flow had dipped below 15 MAF per year around 2000, dropping as low as 12 MAF in 2008. A more recent analysis published by the Water Education Foundation in December 2022 reports “the river’s average flow since 2000 has been 12.3 million acre-feet.” In 2021, gripped by an ongoing drought, Colorado Basin natural flow plummeted to 6.7 MAF, only recovering to 9.9 MAF in 2022.

Average water use when Lake Mead was full back in the early 1940s was 7 MAF per year, rising to 12 MAF per year when Lake Powell was completed in the 1960s. For the last 20 years, average annual water use has plateaued at around 15 MAF per year.

It doesn’t take a hydrologist to take these numbers and project a dire scenario. With annual demand currently at 15 MAF, and annual supply dwindling to 12 MAF, and less than that in the last few years, even big reservoirs such as these are going to lose big gulps of water every year and eventually go dry. That is exactly what’s happening. Both lakes are now approaching the so-called “minimum power pool,” where the water level is too low to flow through hydroelectric turbines, or even “dead pool,” where the level has fallen so far that there are no large conduits placed low enough on the dams to allow a useful volume of water to be released.

This is the brink on which we stand today. Notwithstanding the complex balancing act whereby Lake Powell upstream can release water, so long as it has enough, to keep levels in Lake Mead from dropping to critical levels, for the last several years neither lake has been getting enough new water from natural flows. After years of supply deficits of around 3 MAF per year, any further drop in the water levels in either lake will take away their capacity to release any water beyond whatever natural flows enter the reservoirs from upstream.

Conservation Alone Is Not a Permanent Solution

To manage water scarcity, according to the prevailing wisdom among water bureaucrats and environmentalist activists, water must be used more efficiently. But for the most part this has already been done. For example, at the same time that annual water use from the lower Colorado has been relatively stable at 15 MAF per year, the population of Las Vegas has grown from 1.3 million to 2.9 million. The population of Phoenix has grown from 2.9 million to 4.7 million, and the population of Tucson has grown from 723,000 to just over 1 million. During this same period, from 2000 to 2020, irrigated farm acreage in Arizona has remained stable at just under 1 million acres, as has agricultural water use at just over 4 MAF per year. Through increased efficiency, Arizona’s farmers have achieved this while significantly increasing yields of some of their primary crops. Average alfalfa yields, for example, now accounting for over 300,000 acres of irrigated farmland in Arizona, have risen in the last 20 years from 7 tons per acre to 9 tons per acre.

As the supply of water from the Colorado River dwindles, farm acreage will inevitably shrink. But simply accepting a drastic and permanent cutback in farm acreage in places such as Arizona and California’s Imperial Valley ignores many negative consequences. Growing food in an arid environment may seem wasteful, but this ignores the quantity of still intact wildland and rainforest around the world that will give way to the plow to replace the food that will be lost if that land is taken out of production. If water can be found to keep Arizona and Southern California farmers feeding the world, how much land will be saved somewhere else? As it is, farmers in the American Southwest have become expert at surface drip, subsurface drip, micro-sprinklers, and trickle irrigation. Center-pivot sprinkler irrigation systems are timed to operate when evaporative losses are minimized. Traditional gravity-based flood irrigation is already largely reserved for acreage where the water will reduce salinity and recharge ground aquifers.

Because so many water-efficiency practices are already established, new restrictions on urban water use and major reductions in farm acreage might eliminate the supply deficit but would require punitive levels of rationing on urban residents and create undesirable ripple effects on the national and global farm economy. Even as water planners cope with the immediate crisis, a new sense of urgency should be directed toward building new water-supply infrastructure. Of all the states that could solve this regional problem, California is best positioned to make a difference.

How California Can Solve the Colorado Water Deficit

California imports up to 5 million acre-feet per year from the Colorado River via the Colorado Aqueduct, constructed in 1933. In a crisis, even with senior water rights, California could lose some of that allocation. And California faces a similar crisis with its groundwater, heavily relied on by farmers and heavily overdrafted (for years, more water has been withdrawn than replaced), as well as with its reservoirs, depleted after years of drought. But California has options.

As we have just seen this winter, as well as in the late fall of 2021, even during multi-year droughts, tens of millions of acre-feet rain down onto California via “atmospheric rivers,” but most of the water immediately drains into the ocean. California also has an 840-mile border (not including bays or inlets) with the vast Pacific Ocean, where a limitless supply of ocean water could be desalinated to serve its coastal cities.

Despite all this potential, investments to increase California’s water supply have been incremental at best. But this can change, and if it did, not only Californians but the entire Southwest would benefit. Imagine how much easier it would be to balance the Colorado River supply deficit if Californians were no longer transporting 5 MAF per year out of the lower basin to serve Imperial Valley agriculture and Southern California cities.

From a cost perspective, most supply solutions are financially affordable but nonetheless quite expensive. For example, only about one-third of California’s urban wastewater is recycled. Construction costs to upgrade every water-treatment plant in the state that isn’t already turning sewage back into recycled water for landscaping or even for potable reuse would cost about $20 billion, and give back up to 2 MAF per year.

Desalination is another option, but it is roughly twice as expensive as wastewater recycling. For an estimated construction cost of $20 billion, about 1 million acre-feet of ocean water per year could be desalinated. While it is the most expensive option, desalination has the virtue of being a perennial supply of new water, impervious to drought. What other options are there?

In an era that may involve warmer and drier winters, with less rain and less snowpack, it is necessary to more efficiently harvest runoff from the storms that do hit the state. The traditional way to do this is via reservoir storage, but in-stream reservoirs — those behind a high dam directly blocking a river — cannot be allowed to fill from early storm runoff, because that would render them unable to prevent flooding if there are late spring storms. Then if late spring storms don’t materialize, there’s inadequate reservoir storage and another water shortage.

Off-stream reservoirs, by contrast, don’t block the flow of a natural river. They are typically constructed in arid valleys, and flood runoff is pumped into them during storm events. Using California’s proposed Sites Reservoir as an example ($4 billion for an annual yield of 500,000 acre-feet per year), off-stream reservoirs could capture and release 1 MAF per year for a construction cost of $8 billion. But absent the capacity to capture large volumes of storm runoff and move it into these reservoirs, where will the water come from?

A new proposal, the “Water Blueprint for the San Joaquin Valley,” authored by a coalition of San Joaquin Valley community leaders and regional water agencies, is a work in progress. The centerpiece of this proposal is to construct what are essentially gigantic French drains within channels created inside San Joaquin’s delta islands. By drawing fresh water from perforated pipes situated beneath a gravel bed in these channels, floodwater could be safely harvested from the delta during periods of excess storm runoff. Preliminary plans for this system estimate the cost at $500 million per 200-acre facility. The estimated capacity for two of these facilities would be 2 MAF per year or more, at a total cost of $1 billion.

The blueprint also relies on the construction of a central canal in the San Joaquin Valley to transport water from the harvesting arrays in the delta to underground storage. Aquifer storage capacity in the San Joaquin Valley is conservatively estimated at 50 MAF. The projected cost for this canal, including connections to the Friant-Kern, Delta Mendota, and California aqueducts, as well as facilities to recharge and recover water from the aquifers, is $500 million.

This idea has extraordinary potential. Its preliminary construction cost estimate of $1.5 billion to harvest and recover 2 MAF per year of delta runoff is a rough order of magnitude lower than any other possible solution.

Moreover, it may well be feasible to safely harvest more than 2 MAF from the delta every year. An authoritative 2017 study by the Public Policy Research Institute describes so-called uncaptured water, which is the surplus runoff, often causing flooding, that occurs every time an atmospheric river hits the state. According to the study, “benefits provided by uncaptured water are above and beyond those required by environmental regulations for system and ecosystem water” (emphasis added). The study goes on to claim that uncaptured water flows through California’s Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta “averaged 11.3 million acre-feet [per year] over the 1980–2016 period.”

For this to come from some of the most respected water experts in California is very encouraging: The average quantity of “uncaptured water” flowing through the delta that is “above and beyond those required by environmental regulations for system and ecosystem water” averages 11.3 MAF per year.

An environmentally friendly delta diversion project has several appealing aspects. Unlike the delta pumps, these extraction channels would not harm fish, nor would their operation alter the current of the delta, which brings the risk of saltwater intrusion. Their high capacity may make building the controversial Delta Tunnel unnecessary. Storing high volumes of water in San Joaquin Valley aquifers with a known capacity in excess of that of Lake Mead and Lake Powell combined would eliminate the need for more reservoirs while also making possible almost a limitless capacity to store water from wet years to use in dry years.

The Upside of Massive Investment in Water Infrastructure

The reason the government subsidized water projects during the great waves of dam and aqueduct construction in the 1930s and again in the 1950s and ’60s is because affordable and abundant water lowers the overall cost of living and doing business. It lowers the cost of food. It lowers the cost of housing. It lowers utility bills. This is an economic ripple effect that has no rival. Affordable and abundant water is a core enabler of economic prosperity.

Conservatives ought to appreciate the case for public investment in water infrastructure: Without spending on the front end on huge capital projects that smash the price equilibrium for water and make it affordable, there will be a greater need for government spending on the back end. Billions will instead have to be spent on an enforcement bureaucracy to ration scarce water, along with the enforcement hardware — such as dual residential meters to monitor indoor vs. outdoor use — and additional billions will have to be perpetually spent to subsidize low-income families that cannot afford their water bills, food, and housing.

Investing in abundance at the level of basic economic essentials — water, energy, and transportation infrastructure — is a traditional role of government. The problem with rejecting on principle the use of government funds to subsidize infrastructure is that it implies a preference for spending government funds instead on perpetual funding for the new bureaucracies that will enforce rationing and the permanent burden of subsidies for low-income families.

Equally, opposing government participation in funding water projects is to legitimize the inevitability of high prices and scarcity. Denying funding to create water abundance is to accept the premise that a middle-class lifestyle is unsustainable.

However heretical it may sound to conservative and libertarian ears, there is a case to be made that the WPA projects that gave America Lake Mead, the Colorado Aqueduct, and a host of other assets, long since paid for and which yield dividends to this day, were worthwhile investments. Perhaps if there were sufficient regulatory reforms, private investment could pay for enough new water-supply infrastructure to create affordable abundance. Don’t hold your breath. In the meantime, start moving earth. Start pouring concrete. The water is there. Let’s go get it.

This article originally appeared in the National Review.

The Abundance Choice (part 14) – Infinite Abundance

From the inaugural Stanford Digital Economy Lab gathering in April 2022, noted venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson posted the following quote to Facebook: “Our goal is to usher in an era of infinite abundance.”

“Infinite abundance.”

This phrase epitomizes the ongoing promise of California’s tech culture. Despite every political shortcoming California may suffer, its technology sector continues to set the pace for the rest of the world. “Infinite abundance,” evocative of an earlier tech mantra “better, faster, cheaper,” is not only a defining aspiration of tech entrepreneurs, it is closer to being realized every day.

So why is it that Californians can’t generate abundant electric power? Why is it that Californians can’t figure out how to deliver abundant water? And how does a future of rationed, scarce energy and water square with the dreams of infinite abundance that inspire every one of California’s high tech entrepreneurs and investors? And insofar as the political clout of California’s high tech sector gives it almost infinite influence, when will its high-tech innovators confront this paradox?

For almost every significant resource of consequence to normal working families – energy, water, transportation, housing, and food – ordinary Californians have been betrayed by their elected officials. Everything is running out. Everything costs too much. But when Californians realize that the punitive cost-of-living they’ve endured was the result of poor political choices, and not an inevitable “new normal” they will need to be presented with alternative policies.

Somewhere between the grenade throwing pundit who persuasively condemns everything that’s gone wrong, and the confirmed wonk whose turgid policy prescriptions are never read and typically stay within rigid ideological lanes, we need more people who will instead try to propose practical solutions. Straying well afield of both the complaining cynic and the lost-in-the-weeds wonk, last year I attempted to recruit a team of experts to come up with a policy solution to water scarcity in California. Despite our effort to qualify our initiative getting crushed in its cradle, I believe we succeeded.

The Water Infrastructure Funding Act, unaltered, would have created water abundance in California. Even an attenuated version of this initiative, with a few key elements removed but largely intact, would dramatically improve California’s water supply challenges. But if most of California’s financial special interests oppose water abundance, and powerful environmentalist organizations appear unwilling to support any big new water infrastructure projects, how will Californians ever escape high water prices and rationing?

More generally, if abundance in all things harms financial special interests and is opposed by environmentalists, how will any sort of abundance ever be realized? How will Californians escape a future of rationed scarcity?

This isn’t merely a question for California. As goes California, so goes America. And barring global conflict too terrible to contemplate, as goes America, so goes the world. The Lords of Scarcity will rule the world, coopting their counterparts in other nations, and a new era of feudalism will descend on humanity.

It might not be so bad. Vertical farming and cultivated meat will ensure that nobody starves. New social mores that stigmatize pregnancy as a crime against the planet, combined with a hedonistic culture that condemns traditional families, will result in a diminishing, aging global population. Androids will become caregivers and companions, frequently going into energy saving sleep mode as the apartment dwelling billions, reduced to existence in a handful of megacities, strap on their VR goggles and inhabit the thriving metaverse. Prescription drugs will pacify, palliate, and at the appropriate time, euthanize the old and infirm. Oligarchs will rule the world, machines will produce goods, algorithms will regulate information, and the vast majority of humans will have no idea what they’re missing. The planet’s ecosystems will thrive.

That’s an extreme scenario, and perhaps a cynical portrayal, although we may plausibly imagine far worse. The other extreme scenario, currently marketed by virtually every established institution in the Western World as factual and beyond debate, is that humanity must decarbonize and lower its environmental footprint or the planet will soon become uninhabitable. And based on California’s current politics of scarcity, the inescapable consequence of that premise is that a middle class lifestyle is unsustainable. One must either endure rationed scarcity – in a manner hopefully not as ghastly as imagined in the preceding paragraph – or life on earth will come to an end in a succession of cataclysmic climate catastrophes. That is the extreme narrative that we threatened with our initiative. But ideas without agency is like a head with no body, and agency requires power, and power requires money.

Maybe there’s a civic minded and contrarian billionaire who will spend $5 to $10 million to qualify an initiative to create water abundance in California, then spend another $20 to $50 million to convince voters to approve it. We tried to find one. But without at least a few powerful financial players deciding to challenge the ideology and conventional wisdom used to justify current energy and water policies and use their resources to fight for policies that instead nurture abundance, the Lords of Scarcity are going to win the war. In the meantime it is worthwhile to examine the assertion that middle class lifestyles are unsustainable. Even though it must be challenged, the argument is not unfounded.

The next chart illustrates a stark truth about middle class lifestyles as enjoyed in America. If everyone, including Americans, consumed roughly half as much energy as Americans consumed per capita in 2020, global energy production would need to increase by 87 percent. Applying that same criteria to water would require fresh water availability in the world to increase by 37 percent.

The data on energy is gathered from the authoritative BP Statistical Review of Global Energy and is updated through 2020. The data on water relies on a 2012 study “The Water Footprint of Humanity” conducted by researchers in the Netherlands and cited later that year in Scientific American.

The energy data is fairly straightforward, although BP’s latest energy mega-unit of choice, “exajoules,” has been converted to gigawatt-years in deference to the electric age which, depending on who you ask, is either dawning with enlightened splendor, or being thrust upon us with no regard to efficacy or necessity. For a more thorough discussion of units of energy, refer to the earlier installment “Fighting Scope Insensitivity,” or, put another way, “Numbers Don’t Lie.” That installment offers plenty of details, but for the current discussion, only the proportions matter.

The data on water is anything but straightforward, and not merely because the mega-units were converted from cubic kilometers to million acre feet, but because a nation’s higher than average per capita “water use” doesn’t automatically equate to water waste. A nation with high per capita water use may have a lot of irrigated farmland, and export a lot of agricultural products. The 2012 study found that 92 percent of the global water footprint was for farming.

Even taking into account some limitations in the available data, anyone fighting for abundance must nonetheless confront an inescapable fact: Every American on average uses four times as much energy as people in the rest of the world, and they use three times as much water. Furthermore, if anything, the per capita water use for Americans is understated. Nuances can alter the implications of fractional differences, but they cannot explain away multiples of three or four times. Can abundance for everyone be achieved without destroying the planet?

There are several factors that have to be taken into account to answer this question. Perhaps to begin, here are some premises to introduce as worthy of vigorous debate, since to defend each of them would go well beyond the scope of a book dealing with water policy in California. So for better or for worse, they are:

  • Reserves of fossil fuel – coal, oil, and natural gas – exist in sufficient abundance for global energy production to double within the next few decades, and last for at least another century. Indisputable data to support this claim can be found in the BP report.
  • Emerging nations of the world are not going to abandon using fossil fuel until renewable energy is demonstrably cheaper and available at the scale they need to develop their economies.
  • Renewable energy technologies have not demonstrated they have a cradle-to-grave ecological footprint that is significantly more benign than clean fossil fuel, and the raw materials currently required for their manufacture and operation may actually be more finite than fossil fuel.
  • Abundant and affordable energy is highly correlated with, if not a prerequisite for, broad individual prosperity, female literacy and emancipation, urbanization, and lower birth rates.
  • Lower birth rates and urbanization both lead to less pressure on wilderness habitats, agricultural land, and overall demands on natural resources. This is already happening in most of the world.
  • Emerging energy technologies include fusion power, advanced fission reactors that reuse fuel, factory farmed biofuel, satellite solar power stations, clean hydrogen stripped from fossil fuel or generated from electrolysis, direct synthesis of carbon-based fuel from the atmosphere, and plenty more that we cannot yet imagine.
  • Abundant energy translates directly into abundant water.

It’s important to emphasize that none of the preceding statements offered any challenge to the prevailing theories of CO2 induced climate change. But the sum of these statements amounts to a recipe – and a moral argument – for creating energy and water abundance for all the nations of the world. Adapting to climate change in California via rationing of energy, water and land, which is precisely what we are doing, will not influence the actions of the demographic heavyweights of the world, China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Nigeria, or any other nation that aspires to elevate their citizens to the lifestyle enjoyed by Californians.

Moreover, exporting our policies in the form of international agreements and foreign investment strategies that effectively impose rationing of energy, which is exactly what America is doing today, will perpetuate poverty in those nations. In turn this will defer the voluntary population stabilization that accompanies prosperity, replacing it either with coercive restrictions on childbearing, or Malthusian famines caused by the politics of scarcity. Needless to say, it will also drive these nations to seek resources and financing from aspiring superpower rivals to the U.S.

What California’s policies are currently accomplishing runs contrary to the finest ideals of this state, exemplified from the earliest days of the modern era but especially now, as our technology elites introduce one pathbreaking innovation after another. Scarcity of water and energy, which translates to scarcity of housing and food and good jobs, is the precise opposite of what California ought to stand for, and it is an entirely avoidable condition.

California is blessed with almost every natural resource necessary for a modern civilization to thrive. So why aren’t California’s legislators passing laws to nurture prosperity and abundance in all things, only starting with water and energy.

Why has California’s logging and milling industry been regulated nearly into oblivion? Lumber has become prohibitively expensive in a state that as recently as 1990 harvested over six billion board feet a year of timber and now only harvests one quarter as much.

Why is California importing fertilizer for its eight million acres of irrigated farmland, when plentiful existing resources can be extracted right here to produce it? Why isn’t California trying to keep all of its farmland in production during this time of global food insecurity?

Why is California phasing out natural gas when it is the cleanest fossil fuel?

Why is California banning the internal combustion engine, when alternative combustible transportation fuels including hydrogen, natural gas, factory farmed biofuel, and carbon fuel extracted from the atmosphere are all possible ways to power advanced hybrid vehicles?

Why is California making it almost impossible to build houses on open land when the state is only five percent urbanized?

Why is California shutting down Diablo Canyon’s two reactors, instead of building the plant to its original six reactor design?

All of these policies are causing harm to ordinary Californians. As previously discussed, the idea that California, much less the world, can replace and then increase its total energy production with wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal power systems is ludicrous. California should be pursuing an all-of-the-above strategy with energy and water, using the cleanest and most efficient technologies we can come up with.

Replacing the destructive policies of scarcity with policies that nurture abundance would set an example to the world, and allow Californians to export leading edge products and technologies that appropriately address an insatiable, wholly justified demand – that everyone in the world achieve the standard of living that we take for granted.

That is the abundance choice.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

The Abundance Choice (part 11) – The Desalination Option

On May 12, the California Coastal Commission Board of Directors voted 11-0 to deny the application from Poseidon Water to build a desalination plant in Huntington Beach. Since 1998, Poseidon has spent over $100 million on design and permit work for this plant. At least half of that money was spent on seemingly endless studies and redesigns as the Coastal Commission and other agencies continued to change the requirements. Poseidon’s denial makes it very unlikely another construction contractor will ever attempt to build a large scale desalination plant on the California coast.

This is a historic mistake. If you’re trying to eliminate water scarcity, desalination is an option you can’t ignore. Desalination has the unique virtue of relying on a literally inexhaustible feedstock, the world’s vast and salty oceans. At an estimated total volume of 1.1 quadrillion acre feet (1.1 billion million acre feet), there will always be enough ocean.

A balanced appraisal of desalination would acknowledge its potential while also recognizing the absurdity of suggesting it is a panacea. On one hand, desalination can be an indispensable solution to water scarcity. In Israel, for example, five massive desalination plants on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea produce nearly a half-million acre feet of fresh water per year, an amount the nation plans to double by 2030. Israel’s Sorek Desalination Plant, located a few miles south of Tel Aviv, produces 185,000 acre feet of fresh water per year, from a highly automated operation that only occupies about 25 acres. Up to 80 percent of Israel’s municipal water comes from desalination. Thanks to desalination, this nation of nine million people has achieved water abundance and is exporting its surplus water to Jordan.

On the other hand, just as renewable energy only provides a small fraction of the global energy supply, desalination only constitutes a small fraction of global water supply. Altogether, not quite 20,000 desalination plants worldwide produce less than 50 million acre feet of water per year. That’s an awful lot of water, but it’s less than one percent of global water consumption. To make a dent in the estimated 7,500 million acre feet per year of worldwide water consumption, desalination capacity would have to increase by an order of magnitude, to 500 million acre feet per year. In turn, that achievement would require about 200 gigawatts of continuous power, equivalent to the full output of 100 Hoover Dams.

The Energy Cost of Desalination is Not Prohibitive

Then again, as we will see, and for a variety of reasons, the frequently heard assertion that there isn’t enough energy available to spare any more of it for desalination is not true. For starters, 200 gigawatt-years is only 5.98 quadrillion BTUs, and worldwide, total energy production in 2020 was estimated at 528 quadrillion BTUs (or 17,653 gigawatt-years, or 557 exajoules, which is currently the authoritative BP Statistical Review of Global Energy’s energy mega-unit of choice). Therefore, to desalinate 500 million acre feet of water per year would only consume 1.1 percent of current global energy production.

Taking all of this into account, it’s fair to say that desalination is clearly part of the solution to water scarcity. The potential for a perpetual input of water from desalination plants to tilt the demand and supply equilibrium from one of scarcity to one of abundance should not be underestimated. Israel’s experience is proof of that.

Here in California, the energy required to desalinate seawater is considered one of the prohibitive obstacles towards wider adoption of the technology. But when the alternative to desalinating seawater is paying the energy cost of pumping it from the Sacramento Delta through nearly 300 miles of aqueducts, then lifting it over the Tehachapi pass, the energy costs become less daunting.

The following two charts illustrate the amount of energy necessary to deliver water to Southern California’s coastal cities from three differing sources: upgraded local wastewater treatment to indirect potable standards, interbasin transfer via the California Aqueduct, and desalination. Both charts examine the energy required to deliver 1.0 million acre feet of water. The first chart shows how many units of electrical energy are required, the second chart shows how much flow of electricity a power plant would have to generate in order for each system, operating continuously, to deliver one million acre feet in one year.

The first chart clearly shows that processing wastewater for indirect potable reuse is far more energy efficient than the alternatives. These figures are based on the average, taking into account the power requirements of two treatment plants, the Orange County’s Groundwater Replenishment System (GWRS), along with the wastewater recycling plant which is proposed to be built in the City of Carson in the Los Angeles Basin. According to engineers at GWRS, the plant draws 13 megawatts to treat 103,000 acre feet per year. Information provided by Met on the Carson plant’s design estimated a 30 megawatt draw to treat 168,000 acre feet per year. Based on the average of these two figures, these plants would require 1,309 gigawatt-hours to produce one million acre feet of water.

By comparison, the figures for desalination are based on the Carlsbad plant which draws 23 megawatts to produce 55,000 acre feet of water per year – not including power to deliver the desalinated water. That equates to 3,529 gigawatt-hours to produce one million acre feet of desalinated seawater.

As described earlier, the figures for the California Aqueduct were calculated based on adding up the power consumption per unit of water lifted for each of the six pumping stations that start with the Banks pumping plant just south of the Sacramento Delta, and terminate with the Edmonston pumping plant at the base of the Tehachapi Mountains. This titanic transfer of water has an energy cost of 3,448 gigawatt-hours per million acre feet of water delivered, only slightly better than desalination.

Because every urban setting will have unique requirements for a reuse or desalination project, based on the scale, and the location and elevation of the existing wastewater treatment plant and delivery destinations, it is impossible to generalize with respect to the delivery energy required. But the estimated energy necessary to pump water from the proposed Carson wastewater treatment plant in Los Angeles through up to 60 miles of pipelines to recharge several remote aquifers probably represents the higher amount any project is likely to need. As can be seen in the final row of data below, it is significant. Based on the best estimates made available, the energy necessary to distribute a unit of water from the Carson treatment plant to its destination adds 60 percent to the total energy requirement. This is nonetheless far more efficient than the energy needed to deliver water to Los Angeles via the California Aqueduct.

Making Units of Energy Intelligible

Because units of energy and water are often communicated to the public merely to serve as nuggets of credibility, with no attempt to put them in context or even explain them, four columns appear in the above chart. Each of these units is expressing the same amount of energy. One thousand megawatt-hours (column one) is equal to one gigawatt-hour (column two), and one thousand gigawatt-hours is equal to one terawatt-hour (column three). The fourth column also depicts the same amount of energy as reported in the first three columns, but expresses it in gigawatt-years. As discussed in previous installments, using gigawatt-years (or megawatt-years) is a good way of intuitively and immediately being able to estimate the yield of a renewable energy installation, or the up-time of a power plant, or the through-put of a hydroelectric dam, and so on.

By comparing the megawatt or gigawatt “nameplate capacity” of any project that generates or consumes electricity to that same project’s actual gigawatt-year output or consumption per year, you know the efficiency of that project without having to get out a calculator. As it is, column four – gigawatt-years – is simply the number of gigawatt-hours (column two) divided by the number of hours in a year (365.25 x 24).

In this case, gigawatt-years offers an additional intuitive benefit. It makes it easy to immediately get an idea of how much of California’s total power generation would be absorbed by one of these projects delivering 1.0 million acre feet per year. For example, in 2018, California consumed 57 gigawatt-year units of electricity, which means that on average, the energy flow through California’s energy grid was 57 gigawatts to consumers throughout the state. Therefore, desalinating 1.0 million acre feet of seawater, as can be seen, would consume not quite one percent of the total electricity currently being generated in California (.403 / 57). On the other hand, most of that electricity would be offset, because the California Aqueduct would not be required to pump that 1.0 million acre feet over the mountains if that water was being desalinated locally. Then again, unlike water from the California Aqueduct that flows downhill from the top of the Tehachapi pass and gathers sufficient pressure to gravity feed every distribution extremity in its entire network, desalinated water, like treated wastewater, has to be pumped to its destination, requiring additional energy.

The next chart, below, shows what size power plant would be required to produce 1.0 million acre feet per year based on each method. This chart, which reports flows of energy, assumes continuous operation for one year to deliver the 1.0 million acre feet. A power plant twice as big could deliver 1.0 million acre feet in six months, or 2.0 million acre feet in one year, and so on.

It should be emphasized that if the reader is not familiar with the distinction between units of electrical energy and flow of electrical energy, they are urged to spend some time with this. Given the simplicity of these concepts, engineers may laugh at such unwarranted pedantry. But surprisingly few journalists, politicians, political staffers, or zealous activists are sufficiently versed in these basics, much less conversant enough in them to be familiar not only with the nature of the variables, but their actual values with respect to critical infrastructure. How can anyone evaluate policy options, or even opine with any credibility, without at least trying to see the numerate big picture? For that matter, if it comes as a surprise that desalination only consumes slightly more energy than moving an equivalent amount of water through the California aqueduct, get ready for more surprises. Advances in desalination technology are moving fast.

Addressing Other Concerns About Desalination

Ultimately, the energy cost for desalination means it cannot easily compete with wastewater reuse which requires only about half as much energy per unit of output. But the inexhaustible feedstock, the imperative to have diverse sources of water in the event of supply disruption, and fact that at some point breakthrough technologies will dramatically lower the cost of energy, all make desalination an option that ought to be part of California’s portfolio of water supply projects.

While the energy cost is one major objection to desalination, there is also concern over how the intake pipes and brine disposal pipes affect aquatic life. The debate over the proposed Huntington Beach desalination plant, which would have been a twin to the recently constructed Carlsbad desalination plant, has generated a lot of information to address these environmental concerns. In March, 2021, I interviewed Scott Maloni, a vice president at Poseidon Water, the company that was attempting to build the Huntington Beach Plant. Here are excerpts:

1 – Isn’t desalinated water is contaminated with boron, which is a by-product of the desalination process?

Ocean water has higher concentrations of boron but it is removed by the reverse osmosis process. Boron isn’t a public health and safety concern, but high concentrations of boron can affect the vitality of certain crops and ornamental flowers. Irvine Ranch Water District (IRWD) raised a concern 6 years ago that higher boron levels in desalinated water could affect their ability to operate recycling plants because the byproduct of their plants might exceed regulatory requirements. The Huntington Beach project’s reverse osmosis system is designed to get the boron down to 0.75-1.0 mg/l, which fully addresses IRWD’s concerns.

2 – The Orange County Water District has said they will just store the desalinated water in their aquifers. Won’t that contaminate them?

Desalinated water will not contaminate the groundwater basin. The Orange County Water District (OCWD) puts 100 million gallons of treated wastewater into the groundwater basin every day using the same treatment process that the Huntington Beach desalination plant will use, reverse osmosis. OCWD has not made a decision whether to deliver the desalinated water to cities and water agencies directly through the potable water pipeline system or to inject some or all of the desalinated water into the groundwater basin. The groundwater basin is simply a means of distribution. Putting desalinated water into the groundwater basis allows cities throughout Orange County to pump more groundwater and rely less on imported water.

3 – Won’t marine life will be harmed both by dead zones at the point of brine disposal and destruction of larvae and plankton from the open intake pipes?

The facility is required by state regulations to incorporate the best available and feasible seawater intake and discharge technologies to minimize the intake and mortality of all forms of marine life. The plant will have 1-MM wedgewire screens on the intake with a through screen velocity of less than 0.5 feet per second and a brine diffuser on the outfall. The Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board permit published last month [February 2021] and scheduled for approval in April [2021] finds that the project with these technologies complies with all state marine life protection regulations. There will be no “dead zone” from the discharge. Salinity from the discharge will be 35.5 ppt [parts per thousand], 2 ppt above ambient salinity, at an average radius of 79 feet from the point of discharge. Finally, despite the fact that numerous state agencies have found the unavoidable entrainment of microscopic fish larvae to be insignificant, Poseidon must still mitigate for these impacts as a condition of the Regional Board permit. Poseidon will preserve, restore and create 112 acres of coastal habitat to offset these larval fish impacts including 4 projects in the Bolsa Chica wetlands and a 5th project in the form of a 41-acre artificial reef off the coast of Palos Verdes.

What ought to be obvious from Maloni’s answers is that there is no place on earth that will be more attentive to environmental concerns than California. For that reason alone, California should build more desalination plants, and build them right, in order to set an example to the world.

Something that Maloni didn’t mention was the potential of the California current to disburse brine, the saltier water that remains after fresh water is pushed through the filtration membranes. Not only is desalination brine released under pressure so it will more quickly disburse, but the California current ensures it will never concentrate in one area but will always be swept away. The California current sweeps a mind boggling 250 quadrillion gallons per day of ocean water past the west coast. The Huntington Beach desalination plant is designed to produce 50 million gallons per day of fresh water. The corresponding quantity of daily brine, around 55 million gallons, represents roughly one five-millionth of the water moved by natural current along the coast each day.

To better understand the significance of this fact, consider the studies done on the impact of brine on the Mediterranean Sea, where the equivalent of ten Huntington Beach desalination plants now operate. Compared to the California coast, there is almost no current in the Eastern Mediterranean. And yet these marine environments are not seriously compromised, and adjustments are being made continuously to ensure it stays that way. In fact, most studies concluded that there was more disruption to the marine environment from the movement of water caused by release of the brine under pressure, than by the chemistry of the brine itself. Those studies can be referenced here, here, and here.

It would be a mistake to overemphasize desalination technology. The fact that our initiative campaign included desalination among the categories of projects eligible for funding allowed our opponents to focus, disproportionately, on that specific provision. They used that to mobilize activists that have been fighting desalination for years, and to repeat all of their one-sided arguments against desalination, most of which are addressed here. But it was not a mistake to include desalination among the eligible projects in our initiative. If Californians are serious about solving the water crisis, and achieving a diversity of water sources as a hedge against disaster, they must include desalination. It might never contribute more than a small fraction of California’s total water supply, but it will be a perennial source of water, serving the arid and densely packed coastal cities in Southern California where water is imported from other regions at great cost.

In the meantime, with or without California’s involvement in desalination, the nations of the world are adopting this technology. As the Coastal Commission prevents construction of new desalination plants in California, the state loses yet an0ther way it might overcome water scarcity. But perhaps worse, California loses the opportunity to set an example of best practices to the world.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

How to Make California’s Southland Water Independent for $30 Billion

The megapolis on California’s southern coast stretches from Ventura County on the northern end, through Los Angeles County, Orange County, down to San Diego County on the border with Mexico. It also includes the western portions of Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Altogether these six counties have a population of 20.5 million residents. According to the California Department of Water Resources, urban users consume 3.7 million acre feet of water per year, and the remaining agricultural users in this region consume an additional 700,000 acre feet.

Much of this water is imported. In an average year, 2.6 million acre feet of water is imported by the water districts serving the residents and businesses in these Southland counties. The 701 mile long California Aqueduct, mainly conveying water from the Sacramento River, contributes 1.4 million acre feet. The 242 mile long Colorado River Aqueduct adds another 1.0 million acre feet. Finally, the Owens River on the east side of the Sierras contributes 250,000 acre feet via the 419 mile long Los Angeles Aqueduct.

California’s Plumbing System
The major interbasin systems of water conveyance, commonly known as aqueducts

California’s Overall Water Supplies Must Increase

Californians have already made tremendous strides conserving water, and the potential savings from more stringent conservation mandates may not yield significant additional savings. Population growth is likely to offset whatever remaining savings that may be achievable via additional conservation.

Meanwhile, the state mandated water requirements for California’s ecosystems continue to increase. The California State Water Board is finalizing “frameworks” that will increase the minimum amount of flowrequired to be maintained in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers order to better protect fish habitat and reduce salinity in the Delta. And, of course, these rivers, along with the Owens and Colorado rivers, are susceptible to droughts which periodically put severe strain on water users in California.

At about the same time, in 2015, California’s legislature began regulating groundwater withdrawals. This measure, while long overdue, puts additional pressure on urban and agricultural users.

California’s water requirements for healthy ecosystems, a robust and growing farm economy, as well as a growing urban population, are set to exceed available supply. Conservation cannot return enough water to the system to fix the problem.

How Can Water Supplies Increase?

In Southern California, runoff capture is an option that appears to have great potential. Despite its arid climate and perennial low rainfall, nearly every year a few storm systems bring torrential rains to the South Coast, inundating the landscape. Until the Los Angeles River was turned into a gigantic culvert starting in 1938, it would routinely flood, with the overflow filling huge aquifers beneath the city. Those aquifers remain, although many are contaminated and require mitigation. Runoff harvesting for aquifer storage represents one tremendous opportunity for Southern Californians to increase their supply of water.

The other possibilities are sewage recycling and desalination. In both cases, Southern California already boasts some of the most advanced plants in the world. The potential for these two technologies to deliver massive quantities of potable water, over a million acre feet per year each, is now predicated more on political and financial considerations than technological challenges.

Recycling Waste Water

Orange County leads the United States in recycling waste water. The Orange County Sanitation District treats 145,000 acre feet per year (130 million gallons per day – “MGD”), sending all of it to the Orange County Water District’s “Ground Water Replenishment System” plant for advanced treatment. The GWRS plant is the biggest of its kind in the world. After being treated to potable standards, 124,000 acre feet per year (110 million GPD), or 85 percent of the waste water, is then injected into aquifers to be stored and pumped back up and reused by residents as potable water. The remainder, containing no toxins and with fewer total dissolved solids than seawater, is discharged harmlessly into the ocean.

Currently the combined water districts in California’s Southland discharge about 1.5 million acre feet (1.3 billion GPD) of treated wastewater each year into the Pacific Ocean. Only a small percentage of this discharge is the treated brine from recycled water. But by using the advanced treatment methods as are employed in Orange County, 85% of wastewater can be recycled to potable standards. This means that merely through water reuse, there is the potential to recycle up to another 1.2 million acre feet per year.

Needless to say, implementing a solution at this scale would require major challenges to be overcome. Currently California’s water districts are only permitted to engage in “indirect potable reuse,” which means the recycled water must be stored in an aquifer or a reservoir prior to being processed as drinking water and entering the water supply. By 2023, it is expected the California Water Board will have completed regulations governing “direct potable reuse,” which would allow recycled water to be immediately returned to the water supply without the intermediate step of being stored in an aquifer or reservoir. In the meantime, it is unlikely that there are enough uncontaminated aquifers or available reservoirs to store the amount of recycled water that could be produced.

Desalinating Seawater

The other source of new water for Southern California, desalination, is already realized in an operating plant, the Carlsbad Desalination Plant in San Diego County. This plant produces 56,000 acre feet per year (50 MGD) of fresh water by processing twice that amount of seawater. It is the largest and most technologically advanced desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere. It is co-located with the Encina Power Station, a facility that uses far more seawater per year, roughly ten times as much, for its cooling systems. The Carlsbad facility diverts a portion of that water for desalination treatment, then returns the saltier “brine” to the much larger outflow of cooling water at the power plant.

Objections to desalination are many, but none of them are insurmountable. The desalination plant proposed for Huntington Beach, for example, will not have the benefit of being co-located with a power plant that consumes far more seawater for its cooling system. Instead, this proposed plant – which will have the same capacity as the Carlsbad plant – will use a large array of “wet filters” situated about 1,500 feet offshore, on the seabed about 40 feet below the surface, to gently intake seawater that can be pumped back to the plant without disrupting marine life. The outgoing brine containing 6 percent salt (compared to 3% in seawater) will be discharged under pressure from an underwater pipe extending about 1,800 feet offshore. By discharging the brine under pressure, it will be instantly disbursed and immediately dissipated in the powerful California current.

While desalination is considered to be energy intensive, a careful comparison of the energy cost to desalinate seawater reveals an interesting fact. It takes a roughly equivalent amount of electricity to power the pumps on the California aqueduct, where six pumping stations lift the water repeatedly as it flows from north to south. To guarantee the water flows south, the California aqueduct is sloped downward by roughly one foot per mile of length, meaning pump stations are essential. The big lift, of course, is over the Tehachapi Mountains, which is the only way to import water into the Los Angeles basin.

Barriers to Implementation – Permitting & Lawsuits

The technological barriers to large scale implementation of water recycling and desalination, while significant, are not the primary impediments. Permitting and financing are far bigger challenges. Moreover, financing costs for these mega projects become more prohibitive because of the difficulties in permitting.

The process necessary to construct the proposed Huntington Beach Desalination Plant is illustrative of just how difficult, if not impossible, it is to get construction permits. The contractor has been involved in the permitting process for 16 years already, and despite significant progress to-date, still expects approval, if it comes, to take another 2-3 years.

One of the problems with permitting most infrastructure in California is that several agencies are involved. These agencies can actually have conflicting requirements. Applicants also end up having to answer the same questions over and over, because the agencies don’t share information. And over the course of decades or more, the regulations change, meaning the applicant has to start the process over again. Compounding the difficulties for applicants are endless rounds of litigation, primarily from well-funded environmentalist organizations. The failure to-date of California’s lawmakers to reform CEQA make these lawsuits potentially endless.

Barriers to Implementation – Financing

Even if permitting were streamlined, and all technical challenges were overcome, it would be a mistake to be glib about financing costs. Based on the actual total cost for the Carlsbad desalination plant, just under $1.0 billion for a capacity of 56,000 acre feet per year, the capital costs to desalinate a million acre feet of seawater would be a daunting $18.0 billion. On the other hand, with permitting reforms, such as creating a one-stop ombudsman agency to adjudicate conflicting regulations and exercise real clout among the dozens of agencies with a stake in the permitting process, billions could be shaved off that total. Similarly, CEQA reforms could shave additional billions off the total. How much could be saved?

The Sorek desalination plant, commissioned in Israel in 2015, cost $500 million to build and desalinates 185,000 acre feet of water per year. Compared to Carlsbad, Sorek came online for an astonishing one-sixth the capital cost per unit of capacity. While there’s undoubtedly more to this story, it is also undeniable that other developed nations are able to deploy large scale desalination plants at far lower costs than here in California.

Financing costs for water recycling, while still staggering, are (at least in California) not comparable to those for desalination. The GWRS water recycling plant in Orange County was built at a capital cost of $905 million – $481 million was the initial cost, the first expansion cost $142 million, and the final expansion cost $282 million. This equates to a capital cost of $7,300 per acre foot of annual yield. If that price were to apply for new facilities to be constructed elsewhere in the southland, one million acre feet of recycling capacity could be built for $7.3 billion. Until there is direct potable reuse, however, it would be necessary to add to that cost the expense of either constructing storage reservoirs, or decontaminating aquifers for underground storage.

It’s anybody’s guess, but with reasonable reforms to contain costs, and taking into account additional investments in aquifer mitigation, a budget to make California’s Southland water independent might look like this:

  • 1.0 million acre feet from water recycling – $7.5 billion
  • 1.0 million acre feet from desalination – $15.0 billion
  • 0.5 million acre feet from runoff capture and aquifer mitigation – $7.5 billion

Total – $30 billion.
How much again is that bullet train? Water abundance in California vs. high speed rail

While runoff capture, water recycling, and desalination have the potential to make Southern California’s coastal megapolis water independent, it will take extraordinary political will and innovative financing to make it happen. The first step is for California’s voters and policymakers alike to recognize that conservation is not enough, that water supplies must be increased. Once the political will is established, it will be necessary to streamline the regulatory process, so cities, water agencies, and private contractors can pursue supply oriented solutions, at realistic prices, with a reasonable certainty that their applications will be approved.

*   *   *

How Much California Water Bond Money is for Storage?

Californians have approved two water bonds in recent years, with another facing voters this November. In 2014 voters approved Prop. 1, allocating $7.1 billion for water projects. This June, voters approved Prop. 68, allocating another $4.0 billion for water projects. And this November, voters are being asked to approve Prop. 3, allocating another $8.9 billion for water projects. This totals $20.0 billion in just four years. But how much of that $20.0 billion is to be invested in water infrastructure and water storage?

Summaries of how these funds are spent, or will be spent, can be found on Ballotpedia for Prop. 1, 2014, Prop. 68, 2018 (June), and the upcoming Prop. 3, 2018 (November). Reviewing the line items for each of these bonds and compiling them into five categories is necessarily subjective. There are several line items that don’t fit into a single category. But overall, the following chart offers a useful view of where the money has gone, or where it is proposed to go. To review the assumptions made, the Excel worksheet used to compile this data can be downloaded here. The five categories are (1) Habitat Restoration, (2) Water Infrastructure, (3) Park Maintenance, (4) Reservoir Storage, and (5) Other Supply/Storage.

California Water Bonds, 2014-2018  –  Use of Funds
($=millions)

The Case for More Water Storage

It isn’t hard to endorse the projects funded by these water bonds. If you review the line items, there is a case for all of them. This November, voters will have a chance to approve $200 million to restore Salton Sea habitat, a sum that joins the $200 million of Salton Sea habitat restoration approved by voters in June 2018 in Prop. 68. This November, voters will have a chance to approve $150 million to turn the Los Angeles River back into a river, instead of the concrete culvert that was completely paved over between 1938 and 1960.

Who would be against projects like this? But Californians are heavy water consumers in a relatively arid state. Habitat restoration and park maintenance spending must be balanced against spending for water infrastructure. And conservation mandates must be balanced with investments in infrastructure that increase the overall supply of water. Here’s how Californians are currently managing their water:

Total Water Supply and Usage in California

As can be seen on the above table, residential water consumption represents less than 6% of California’s total water diversions. Indoor water consumption, only about half of that. Yet conservation measures imposed on California’s households are somehow expected to enable more water to be returned to the environment. Even with farmers, where conservation measures have the potential to yield far more savings, putting more irrigated land into agricultural production easily offsets those savings.

Not only does conservation fail to return sufficient water to the environment for habitat maintenance, but there is a downside in terms of system resiliency. During the last drought, when households were asked to reduce water consumption by 20%, it wasn’t an impossible request to fulfill. But as these reductions in consumption become permanent, far less flexibility remains.

California’s climate has always endured periods of drought, sometimes lasting several years. Meanwhile, the population continues to increase, farming production continues to rise, and we have higher expectations than ever in terms of maintaining and restoring healthy ecosystems throughout the state. We cannot merely conserve water. We need to also increase supplies of water. Ideally, by several million acre feet per year.

How Much California Water Bond Money is for Surface Storage?

Prop. 1, approved by voters in 2014, was called the “Water Quality, Supply, and Infrastructure Improvement Act of 2014.” It was marketed as necessary to increase water storage in order to protect Californians against droughts, and was overwhelmingly approved by over 67% of voters. But only about one-third of the money actually went to water storage, and it took nearly four years before any of those funds were allocated to specific storage projects. It was only this month, July 2018, that the California Water Commission awarded grants under their “Water Storage Investment Program.”

A review of these grants indicates that only two of them allocate funds to construct large new reservoirs. The proposed Temperance Flat Reservoir will add 1.2 million acre feet of storage. Situated south of the delta, it will be constructed on the San Joaquin River above a much smaller existing dam. It is estimated to cost $2.7 billion, and the California Water Commission awarded $171 million, only about 6% of the total required funds.

The proposed Sites Reservoir is situated north of the delta, west of the Sacramento river. It is an offstream reservoir, meaning that it will be filled using excess storm runoff pumped out of the Sacramento river during the rainy season. It is designed to store up to 1.8 million acre feet of water and is estimated to cost $5.2 billion to construct. The California Water Commission awarded $816 million, a large sum, but only about 16% of the total required funds.

Two other surface storage projects were approved, expansion of the existing Los Vaqueros and Pacheco reservoirs. Both of these reservoirs serve water consumers in the San Francisco Bay Area, both are supplied water via the California Aqueduct, and both expansion projects are estimated to cost not quite a billion dollars – $795 million for Los Vaqueros and $969 million for Pacheco. The California water commission awarded Los Vaqueros $459 million, and they awarded Pacheco $484 million.

When you consider surface storage, the total capacity of a reservoir is a critical variable, but in many ways more significant is the annual “yield.” This is the amount of water that on average, over decades, the reservoir is planned to deliver to water consumers in normal years. While the Los Vaqueros and Pacheco reservoir expansions combined will add roughly 250,000 acre feet of storage capacity, most of this added capacity is to save for drought years. Los Vaqueros may actually yield up to 35,000 acre feet per year in normal years; Pacheco may yield around 20,000 acre feet per year in normal years.

With respect to annual yields, the case for the much larger Sites and Temperance Flat reservoirs becomes more compelling. The Temperance Flat Reservoir is projected to yield 250,000 acre feet of water in normal years, the Sites Reservoir, a massive 500,000 acre feet. To put this in perspective, 750,000 acre feet represents 20% of ALL residential water consumption in California, or, put another way, each year these reservoirs will yield a quantity of water equivalent to 100% of the reductions achieved via conservation measures imposed on California’s residents during the drought. But will they ever get built?

According to spokespersons for the Sites and Temperance Flats projects, some federal funding is expected, but most of the funding will be from agricultural and urban water districts who will purchase the water (as well as the right to store surplus water in the new reservoir) as soon as its available. The projects still require congressional approval, and then will face a multi-year gauntlet of permit processes and the inevitable litigation. If all goes well, however, both of them could be built and delivering water by 2030.

How Else is Water Bond Money Being Used to Increase Water Supply?

All three of the recent water bonds had some money allocated to invest in water supply. Prop. 1 in 2014, in addition to investing $1.9 billion in surface water storage, allocated $1.4 billion to other projects intended to increase water supply. The projects they approved are either intended to store water in underground aquifers, or fund advanced water treatment and recycling technologies which have the practical effect of increasing water supply. While it isn’t clear from these groundwater storage proposals how much water they would then release in normal years, it appears that cumulatively the projects intend to eventually store as much as 1.0 million acre feet in underground aquifers.

At a combined cost total cost of under one billion, the aquifer storage projects just approved appear to be more cost effective than surface storage. It is also a critical priority to recharge California’s aquifers which have been drawn down significantly over the past several years, especially during the recent drought.

Prop. 68, the “Parks, Environment, and Water Bond” passed earlier this year, while mostly allocating its $4.0 billion to other projects, did allocate $290 million to “groundwater investments, including groundwater recharge with surface water, stormwater, and recycled water and projects to prevent contamination of groundwater sources of drinking water.”

The upcoming Prop. 3, the $8.9 billion “Water Infrastructure and Watershed Conservation Bond Initiative” that will appear on the November 2018 ballot, invests another $350 million to maintain existing, mostly small urban reservoirs, along with $200 million to complete repairs on the Oroville Dam. Prop. 3 also includes $1.6 billion to otherwise increase water storage and supply, including $400 million for wastewater recycling and $400 million for desalination of brackish groundwater.

It is important to emphasize again that all of the funds allocated in these three water bonds are paying for what are arguably worthwhile, if not critical projects. $6.3 billion for habitat restoration, $6.2 billion for water infrastructure, $1.6 billion to maintain our parks. But despite the worth of these other projects, Californians urgently need to increase their annual supply of water to ensure ecosystem health, irrigate crops, and supply urban consumers. And to address that need, out of $20 billion in water bonds passed or proposed between 2014 and this November, only $5.8 billion, less than one-third, is being used to increase water supplies.

What Other Ways Could Water Bond Money Be Used to Increase Water Supply?

Clearly the most important region to increase water supply is Southern California. Two thirds of all Californians live south of the Sacramento River Delta, while most of the rain falls on in Northern California. One way to increase California’s supply of fresh water is to build desalination plants. This technology is already in widespread use throughout the world, deployed at massive scale in Singapore, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Australia, and elsewhere. One of the newest plants worldwide, the Sorek plant in Israel, cost $500 million to build and desalinates 120,000 acre feet of water per year.

Theoretically – because capital costs in California are far higher than in most of the rest of the developed world – desalination offers a cost-effective solution to water scarcity. Uniquely, desalination creates new water, not dependent on rainfall, not requiring storage for drought years, not requiring redirecting of water from other uses. Imagine if Californians invested in desalination plants along the entire Southern California Coast. Eight desalination plants the same size as the Sorek plant would cost $4.0 billion to build if constructed for the same cost as the one in Israel cost. They could desalinate 1.0 million acre feet per year.

The energy costs for desalination have come down in recent years. Modern plants, using 16″ diameter reverse osmosis filtration tubes, only require 5 kWh per cubic meter of desalinated water. This means it would only require a 700 megawatt power plant to provide sufficient energy to desalinate 1.0 million acre feet per year. Currently it takes about 300 megawatts for the Edmonston Pumping Plant to lift one million acre feet of water from the California aqueduct 1,926 ft (587 m) over the Tehachapi Mountains into the Los Angeles basin. And that’s just the biggest lift, the California aqueduct uses several pumping stations to transport water from north to south. So the net energy costs to desalinate water on location vs transporting it hundreds of miles are not that far apart.

The entire net urban water consumption on California’s “South Coast” (this includes all of Los Angeles and Orange County – over 13 million people) is 3.5 million acre feet. It is conceivable that desalination plants producing 1.0 million acre feet of new water each year, combined with comprehensive sewage reuse and natural runoff harvesting could render the most populous region in California water independent.

Why is Infrastructure so Expensive in California?

The Carlsbad desalination plant in San Diego cost $925 million to build, and it has a capacity of 56,000 acre feet per year. That is a capital cost per acre foot of annual yield of $16,500. How is it that the Sorek desalination plant in Israel cost $500 million to build and has a capacity of 120,000 acre feet per year – a capital cost per acre foot of annual yield of only $4,100? Why did it cost four times as much to build the Carlsbad desalination plant?

This is the prevailing question when evaluating infrastructure investment in California. Why does everything cost so much more? The Sites reservoir is projected to cost $5.2 billion. An off-stream reservoir of equal size, the San Luis Reservoir, was constructed in California in the 1960s at a total cost, in 2018 dollars, of $2.3 billion. That all-in cost includes not just the dam, but also includes pumping stations, the forebay, the intertie to the California Aqueduct, and conveyances to get some of the water over the Diablo Range into the Santa Clara Valley. All of these costs (in today’s dollars) for the San Luis Reservoir, compared to the proposed Sites Reservoir, cost less than half as much. Why?

It’s easy to become enthusiastic about virtually any project that will increase our resiliency to disasters and droughts, improve our quality of life, steward our ecosystems, and hopefully create abundance of vital resources such as water. But when considering the need for these various projects, it is equally important to ask why they cost so much more here in California, and to explore ways to bring costs back down to national and international norms. We could do so much more with what we have to spend.

Edward Ring co-founded the California Policy Center and served as its first president.