Desalination and engineering optimism

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Nearly every time I give a talk on water (which seems to happen frequently lately – wonder if I’ll be less popular as a speaker once the drought ends) I get asked about desalination. It is, as Bettina Boxall noted in a recent LA Times story, the stuff of dreamers: “an inexhaustible, drought-proof reservoir in the state’s backyard”.

Or not. Using the Poseidon project in Southern California, Boxall does a nice job of demonstrating why, despite many proposals and much engineering enthusiasm, we’re not seeing much desal in practice:

The reasons boil down to money and energy. It takes a lot of both to turn ocean water into drinking water, driving the average price of desalinated supplies well above most other sources.

Desal, it seems, is one of those ten-dollar bills on the sidewalk that economists like to joke about.

On the unpopularity of peripheral thingies in northern California

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To say that it is unpopular in northern California when the state ships water from north south is to understate things. So here’s a fun little bit of history on the willingness of the Record Searchlight, in Redding, to buck the will of its readers. From Bruce Ross, the paper’s current editorial page editor, great moments in editorial persuasion:

Northern California fiercely opposed the Peripheral Canal, and our area was no exception. The referendum on the issue, Proposition 9, was as one-sided as I’ve ever seen. The vote was 94.5 percent against in Trinity and Siskiyou counties, 89.5 percent against in Shasta County. November’s vote to lock up sex offenders for longer wasn’t that lopsided.

Anyway, I also found our editorial on the subject. Bucking 90 percent of readers, we endorsed Prop. 9, for a rather subtle set of reasons involving protection of North Coast rivers. Well, maybe our endorsement explains the 5 percent larger vote in favor in Shasta County. Hey, we get results.

Desal and the broken windows fallacy

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The “broken windows fallacy” is the economic argument that spending money on X is of intrinsic value because of the jobs created, regardless of the value of the thing being done. The reference to broken windows is the argument’s reductio ad absurdum – hire one person to break a bunch of windows, and a second person to fix them. Certainly the people hired to break and fix windows make out OK under the arrangement, but does society benefit?

Supporters of the Carlsbad Desalination Project in California have been making the jobs argument of late:

Like so many San Diegans, David Shin was laid off in 2009.

“I know what it’s about to not be in a job for awhile,” said Shin. “It’s an eye-opener.”

But now, with his gloves on, walking alongside the site for the Carlsbad Desalination Plant, Shin said things are looking up.

“It’s great to know there is work out there,” said Shin. “It not only provides jobs for the local people, but it has the added benefit of clean water for everyone.”

Shin is an engineer who works on the filters that turn ocean water purer than bottled water through reverse osmosis. He’s one of 2,500 San Diegans brought on to work on the controversial plant.

To be clear, I’m not mocking the 10News story I’m quoting there. It at least hints at the flip side of the argument:

Most San Diegans will see a $5 to $7 increase in their residential bill every month.

And of course, the core of the broken windows fallacy is that the money spent building desal plants could have instead been used in some other way. What’s the benefit, and what’s the opportunity cost?

So my question: is coastal desal a broken windows thing?

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Navajo water rights

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From this morning’s newspaper, a deep dive into the issues surrounding the Navajo Nation’s struggle to secure water rights in northwestern New Mexico:

It was 1948.

Fred Wilson, New Mexico’s representative to the interstate group working to divide up the waters of the Upper Colorado River Basin, was pleading.

“The state of New Mexico wants the Indians to be protected,” Wilson told the other commissioners at the gathering in Vernal, Utah. The federal government’s Office of Indian Affairs had estimated that future water needs for Navajo Nation lands within the state of New Mexico would be substantial. But no deal that did not set aside enough water for both Indian and non-Indian water users could win political approval in New Mexico, Wilson told the other negotiators.

Water for the possible completion of the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project, first promised by Congress in 1962, but never finished by the federal government, is at the heart of a battle playing out in San Juan County court. (Journal file)

Wilson got his way. The final Upper Colorado River Basin Compact gave New Mexico a large share of water compared with the state’s contributions to the big river’s flow.

“New Mexico was allotted a share of water sufficiently large to take care of every water use currently planned for the Indians by the Office of Indian Affairs,” wrote Clifford Stone, the state of Colorado’s representative to the commission.

But while the 1948 compact gave New Mexico a big lump sum of water, it was left to the state and Navajo Nation to work out the details.

Sixty-five years later, the Navajo Nation is back in court, defending its claim to the water with the backing of the state of New Mexico and the federal government.

 

Technology is not just the gizmo

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Here’s a great reminder that technology properly understood is not just the gizmo, it’s the human-gizmo interaction.

The old people apartments where Mom lives some time ago added big-screen TV’s on the wall between the elevators on every floor. The idea was to use them as a messaging system, giving residents up-to-date information on stuff. Some improvisation has been required:

creative use of technology

creative use of technology

This is just a funeral notice correction. My favorite bit was the creative way the residents used it to circumvent HIPAA federal medical privacy rules when one of them ended up in the hospital. The institution is not allowed to release health care information on a resident, but the residents scrounged it up among themselves and posted notes on the TV by the elevator – updates on how she was doing, which hospital room, visiting hours, etc.

River beat: 54 percent of average runoff into Lake Powell

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The February forecast is for not very much water to flow down the Colorado River and its tributaries into Lake Powell:

Lake Powell inflow forecast, courtesy CBRFC

Lake Powell inflow forecast, courtesy CBRFC

The dotted line is the median forecast. The solid line above it is the mean. The median forecast is for 54 percent of normal into Lake Powell. The dark blue  bands mean that, even if it’s wet as hell from here on out (don’t count on that) we’ll have a below-average year on the Colorado River. Most probably, a lot below average.