Tag Archive for: Huntington Beach desalination plant

Dams and Desalination – California Needs Both

When Californians can take showers, without flow restrictors, for as long as they want, and when Californians can have lawns again instead of rocks and cacti in their front yards, water infrastructure in California will once again be adequate.

When California’s farmers can get enough water to grow food, instead of watching their suddenly useless holdings of dead orchards and parched furrows get sold for next to nothing to corporate speculators and subsidized solar farm developers, water infrastructure in California will once again be adequate.

One of the difficulties in forming a coalition powerful enough to stand up to the corporate environmentalist lobby in California is the perception, widely shared among the more activist farming lobby, that desalination is more expensive than dams.

That’s not true. It depends on the desalination, and even more so, it depends on the dam.

As a baseline, consider the cost of desalination in California’s lone large scale operating plant in Carlsbad north of San Diego. The total project costs for this plant, including the related pipes to convey the desalinated water to storage reservoirs, was just over $1.0 billion. At a capacity to produce 56,000 acre feet per year, the construction cost per acre foot of annual capacity comes in just over $17,000.

When it comes to the price of desalinated water, payments on the bond that financed the construction costs form the overwhelming share of the cost per acre foot.

For example, California’s second major desalination project, the proposed plant in Huntington Beach, will have a total project cost of $1.3 billion. Similar to Carlsbad, this plant will produce 50 million gallons of fresh water per day. A 20 year bond paying 7 percent will require annual payments of $122 million. That payment, applied to the hundred cubic foot increments, or CCF, that typically appear on a consumer’s water bill to measure their consumption, comes up to $5.03. By contrast, the cost per CCF for the desalination plant’s operating expenses is only $0.41, and the price per CCF for a desalination plant’s electricity consumption (at $0.10 per kilowatt-hour) is only $1.08. Initial construction costs, comprising 77 percent of the price of desalinated water, are the only reason desalination is considered expensive.

Compare this to the price of water from reservoirs, keeping in mind that paying off the construction costs for the dams are also the biggest variable in determining how much consumers have to pay for that water. With dams, unlike desalination plants, two factors come into play: the storage capacity, and the annual yield. With desalination plants the yield is up to the managers. Run the plant, out comes fresh water. With dams, how much water is released from the reservoir to downstream consumers in any given year depends on rainfall.

For this reason, the average annual yield of the reservoir is the most accurate way to measure its cost effectiveness. And this amount can vary widely. One of California’s biggest proposed new projects is the Sites Reservoir. It would be situated in a valley west of the Sacramento River, north of the Delta. As an off-stream reservoir, it would have water pumped into it when storm runoff is causing flooding. A twin to the already existing San Luis Reservoir, located west of the California Aqueduct south of the Delta, the Sites would have a capacity to store 2.0 million acre feet. But its yield is estimated at 500,000 acre feet per year.

In the case of the Sites Reservoir, this compares favorably to desalination. The Sites project is estimated to cost $5.0 billion, so the construction cost per acre foot of annual capacity comes in at $10,000, better than desalination at $17,000.

On the other hand, the case of the proposed Temperance Flat Reservoir is not so clear. The estimated cost for this dam is $2.6 billion and the planned storage capacity is 1.3 million acre feet. So far so good. But while estimates vary, the most optimistic projected average annual yield is around 100,000 acre feet per year. This equates to a construction cost of $26,000 per acre foot of annual capacity, considerably worse than desalination.

Does the fact that desalination yields a better return on construction costs than Temperance Flat mean that the Temperance Flat Reservoir project should be abandoned? Not necessarily. Back in 2017, during record rains, the San Joaquin River flooded, and that water – desperately needed by San Joaquin Valley farmers – could have still been in that reservoir and available for use today. The advantage of big surface storage reservoirs is not their return on capital investment, it’s that they can prevent flooding in wet years, and hold massive quantities of water in reserve for dry years.

Similarly, foes of desalination point to the more cost-effective Sites Reservoir proposal as evidence that desalination is too expensive. But the productivity of desalination is impervious to droughts; the water just keeps coming, year after year, no matter what. And the electricity required to run desalination, while significant, is no greater than the electricity currently used by a series of massive pumping stations necessary to transport water from north to south, over the mountains, and into the Los Angeles Basin – over 2.5 million acre feet per year.

Infrastructure development in California has been paralyzed by litigation and legislation. The result is a self-imposed scarcity of water that can be solved by an all-of-the-above strategy to develop new dams and desalination plants. Civilization requires a footprint, a plain fact that wasn’t lost on previous generations. We’ve learned how to mitigate the worst impact of new infrastructure, but cannot let the ideals of ecological perfection be an excuse to impoverish ourselves.

General obligation bonds to defray the cost to farmers and residents are something the people of California might accept. Then if the rains don’t come for years on end, Californians will still be able to purchase food grown in-state, and enjoy more of the normal amenities of life – a long hot shower. A healthy lawn.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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SoCal Desalination Plant Inches Towards Approval

In a rare and commendable display of political courage and common sense, California Governor Gavin Newsom has been working to finally grant permits to construct a second major seawater desalination plant on the Southern California Coast.

But don’t count on this new water source just yet. Despite clearing major hurdles, the “environmentalists” and their allies in the media are not going to quit.

In a predictably slanted hatchet job, poorly disguised as an investigative report, the Los Angeles Times is doing everything it can to derail the project. According to their February 26 article, “environmentalists” have serious concerns about the proposed plant, set to be constructed in Huntington Beach and using a similar design to one already successfully operating about 60 miles south in Carlsbad. But why are the only environmentalists used as sources for supposedly objective journalists the ones that disparage desalination?

Here are some of the problems that “environmentalists,” who purport to speak for everyone who cares about the environment, have with the proposed desalination plant in Huntington Beach. Quoting from the LA Times article:

“Though the Huntington Beach facility meets the state goal of diversifying California’s water supply, it would undermine other environmental policies. The plant would require large amounts of electricity; it would sit next to a rising sea; and it would continue the use of huge ocean intakes harmful to microscopic marine life.”

These objections are easily answered. Every drop of water that is produced by the plant is water that does not have to be transported from reservoirs in Northern California, at an energy cost that rivals that of desalination. Even the most aggressive projections of sea level rise would not affect operations of the Huntington Beach plant, and even if some adaptations eventually were necessary they would be part of a larger project to protect the Los Angeles coast. As for the “intakes harmful to microscopic marine life,” the design of these intakes prevents any significant wildlife impact. The intake filters are huge, which disperses the negative pressure over a very large surface area, and the pressure is periodically reversed, freeing the filter surfaces of microorganisms.

Concerns about desalination along with the responses could occupy volumes, and have. But the notion that there is any sort of consensus among environmentalists that seawater desalination is a bad choice is false. Every option to supply the resources required to sustain urban civilization is fraught with tradeoffs. With Californians possibly facing yet another drought, desalination offers a way to take pressure off countless stressed ecosystems upstream.

Economic arguments offer a more credible case against desalination, but can fail to acknowledge the variability of the market price for water. In drought years, municipal water purchasers and farmers with perennial crops have paid well over the price for desalinated fresh water, which for San Diego’s Carlsbad plant comes in at around $2,000 per acre foot. To be sure, this price is well in excess of the wholesale price for water in wet years, which can drop well under $500 per acre foot. But for an urban area such as Los Angeles, situated on an arid desert located 500 miles or more from its sources of water, adding the expensive but certain option of desalinated water to a portfolio of water procurements is a prudent bet.

Water supply resiliency is not merely dependent on weather. Even if a Sierra snowpack reliably forms winter after winter for the next several decades, residents of the Los Angeles Basin still depend on three aging canals, precarious ribbons that each stretch for hundreds of miles. Earthquakes, terrorism, or other disasters could shut them down indefinitely. In an average year, 2.6 million acre feet of water is imported by the water districts serving the residents and businesses in California’s 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.

In a recent book “Winning the Water Wars,” published in 2020 by the Pacific Research Institute, author Steven Greenhut concludes the solution to California’s water challenges is to pursue an all-of-the-above strategy that embraces abundance, or as he puts it “feeding more water into the plumbing.” He writes: “In addition to building more surface and groundwater storage facilities, California can deal with its water problems by building ocean desalination plants and increasing its commitment to wastewater reuse and other innovations.” If Greenhut, who talked with countless experts while researching his book, and who is a confirmed libertarian, can support the economics of public and private investment in desalination, anyone can.

A series of California Policy Center reports in 2018 expand on the concept of water abundance. Part two of the report, “How to Make California’s Southland Water Independent for $30 Billion,” surveys existing investments in desalination and wastewater reuse and comes up with the following capital budget: $7.5 billion to build the treatment plants to annually recover and perpetually reuse the 1.0 million acre feet of wastewater that currently is still treated and released into the Pacific Ocean. Another $15 billion to build desalination plants with a combined capacity of another 1.0 million acre feet per year. And $7.5 billion to upgrade and optimize the capacity to capture runoff, mitigate the capacious aquifers beneath the City of Los Angeles, and use them all for water storage.

This is the sort of water project that should be animating California’s politicians. There are 5.1 million households in the three counties that would benefit from this scheme – Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside. A $30 billion capital improvement bond would cost each household $384 per year. If revenue bonds were to pass half the cost to ratepayers – a reasonable burden that would bring even desalinated water down to an affordable consumer price – the general obligation bonds would only add new taxes of $192 to each household. Debt like this is referred to as “good debt,” unlike the $100 billion or so in debt that would be necessary to complete a nearly useless, obsolete before it’s even done, make-work project like the bullet train.

Along with thinking big on the policy of water abundance, Gavin Newsom should take steps to keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant open. That would solve the energy challenge associated with desalination overnight. Diablo Canyon, situated on a mere 12 acres, produces 1.8 gigawatts of continuous, clean electric power. Based on the Carlsbad desalination plant’s performance, the energy input required to produce 1.0 million acre feet of desalinated seawater per year is only 560 megawatts, less than one-third of Diablo Canyon’s output.

The biggest impediment to Californians achieving water abundance, along with energy abundance and abundant, affordable housing, are “environmentalist” pressure groups that purport to speak for everyone who cares about the environment. These groups have tied infrastructure development and housing development in California up in knots for decades. None are worse than the Sierra Club which, of course, bitterly opposes the proposed Huntington Beach desalination plant.

A prime example of the harm the Sierra Club has done is the intense opposition they threw against Prop. 3, the state water bond that faced voters in November 2018.

This bond, losing by less than one percent, would have done amazing things for California. It was a hard won compromise between environmental groups, farmers, and urban water agencies. It would have allocated $9 billion in new funds, roughly half and half between water infrastructure projects including new runoff capture and storage, and environmental mitigation. Absolutely wondrous mitigation opportunities were lost when that bond failed, including reviving the Salton Sea and turning the Los Angeles River back into a river. Currently the Los Angeles “river” is a cliche, a gigantic concrete channel, slick as a runway, known to all American movie buffs as an obligatory leg on every car chase that takes place in downtown Los Angeles. Imagine this river if it were restored, with parks, trees, bike paths, trails and wildlife habitat, winding through the heart of a great city.

It wouldn’t have taken much for this bond to pass, but the Sierra Club objected to funds from the bond being allocated to repair the Friant-Kern canal. Their arguments were based mostly on a belief that the cost of those repairs should have been borne by the farming interests in the South San Joaquin Valley that use water from the canal, but even so, this was a minor defect.

The Sierra Club is well known for ruining what are otherwise viable compromises. For years, forestry experts have understood that the combination of fire suppression, reduced logging, and restrictions on controlled burns were leaving California’s forests dangerously overgrown. Dying trees and cataclysmic fires are the result of this neglect, and hence the conflagrations we’ve seen in recent years would have happened with or without climate change. But for decades, the Sierra Club has relentlessly opposed a return to sensible forest management. Don’t believe it? Ask Senator Feinstein.

“Sen. Feinstein blames Sierra Club for blocking wildfire bill,” reads the provocative headline on a 2002 story in California’s Napa Valley Register. Feinstein had brokered a congressional consensus on legislation to thin “overstocked” forests close to homes and communities, but could not overcome the environmental lobby’s disagreement over expediting the permit process to thin forests everywhere else.

Quoting from the Napa Valley Register, “Sen. Dianne Feinstein blames environmental ally the Sierra Club for Congress’ failure to pass legislation last month to thin national forests to reduce wildfire threats in the West.” And from the Senator herself, as quoted in the article: “”The Sierra Club roasted me.”

The bargains required to rescue California depend on extreme groups like the Sierra Club either backing off or being exposed and discredited. Over five million acre feet more water per year can be achieved through a combination of desalination, total wastewater reuse, and increased storage including building the Sites Reservoir and raising the height of the Shasta Dam. Why would sincere environmentalists oppose having another five million acre feet of water that could be left in the rivers? Why would they object to the entire Southland becoming water independent? Why wouldn’t they be thrilled by the options this water abundance would enable, such as restoring wetlands and riparian habitats up and down the state? Is this about the environment, or about money and power?

Meanwhile, the “environmentalists” that have turned California into a state of expensive scarcity get plenty of help from the media. The previously noted article in California’s newspaper of record, the Los Angeles Times, came out on February 26, only days after the Huntington Beach desalination plant got crucial approvals. And what was the thrust of this article? Reminding readers that one of the guests at Newsom’s infamous “French Laundry” dinner was a lobbyist for Poseidon, the company trying to build the desalination plant in Huntington Beach. Guilt by association. The article goes on to quote anonymous “critics” who complain that “Newsom and his political appointees are exerting heavy influence to benefit a private company that would produce some of the state’s most expensive supplies.”

The article then infers that state review of the desalination plant’s application is inappropriate, writing “Emails obtained by The Times and the environmental group California Coastkeeper Alliance through the state Public Records Act indicate that top California Environmental Protection Agency officials have been involved in a water board’s review of the complex proposal.” But why is this inappropriate? The application has been stalled for twenty years. And the state oversees everything that happens on coastal land.

Piling it on, the author writes “In addition, Newsom took the unusual step of replacing a Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board member who was highly critical of the project.” Good! Newsom is doing something right.

Reading this article, if you can wade through all the hackery, offers a grim assessment of how many hoops still remain before there will be one more desalination plant on the California Coast. There ought to be twenty of them operating by now. If and when the rains fail for more than a few years in a row, Californians need to remember how and why they ended up so thirsty.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

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California’s Cruel Green Cramdown

A few years ago a provocative book by Rupert Darwall entitled “Green Tyranny” made the case that climate alarm is more about power and control, and less about the climate or the environment. Darwell’s reasoning, echoed today by a growing number of economists and environmentalists such as Bjorn Lomborg and Michael Shellenberger, concludes that environmental extremism, especially now that it is amped up with climate alarm, is disastrous to both the environment and the economy.

It’s actually worse than that, however, because the economic misery inflicted by extreme environmentalism only afflicts middle class and low income people. Wealthy elites are either indifferent to the costs, or make hefty profits. In America, California is ground zero for green tyranny. If Joe Biden actually manages to take office in January 2020, every state will have to contend with what Californians have endured for decades.

There’s a reason that in California it costs so much to rent an apartment, or buy a house. There’s a reason why bills for gas and electricity are so high, and why water bills are so expensive, and why sometimes water is even rationed.

The green tyrants of California explain away the punitive cost-of-living endured by ordinary residents as the result of capitalism, racism, and white oppression, or maybe they just blame Republicans. To-date, with a majority of Californians, this nonsensical, obsessive distraction still works. But it’s wearing thin. The real reason everybody in California suffers from a high cost of living is extreme environmentalism, translated into laws that benefit the wealthy and connected, and impoverish everyone else.

Extreme environmentalists have made it almost impossible to get permits to build new homes. California has five times as much land used for grazing cattle than land used for homes and businesses, but all that land is off limits because of environmentalist restrictions.

Extreme environmentalists have made electricity expensive because the only new sources of electricity have to be from wind and solar power, even though California has plenty of natural gas which is clean and cheap. Environmentalists are even making the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant shut down in a few years, even though it generates almost 10 percent of California’s electricity supply.

Extreme environmentalists won’t allow any new water storage, preventing Californians from capturing more runoff from winter storms. Up and down the state, new dams that could guarantee Californians always have affordable and plentiful water are stopped by environmentalists. They won’t even allow desalination plants to be built on the coast, plants that could produce millions of acre feet of fresh water.

Environmentalists have practically destroyed California’s timber industry, which is the real reason its overgrown forests are burning. They have also made it impossible to operate mines and quarries so Californians have more affordable and abundant building materials. And all of this takes away good jobs.

David vs the Green Goliath

An apt metaphor for the green tyranny that grips California is the story of David and Goliath, although the metaphor breaks down when considering David’s ability to sling a stone into Goliath’s unarmored forehead, to deadly effect. The Green Goliath that terrorizes California is a coalition so powerful that only a massive populist rebellion can stop it.

At the head of this leviathan are massive environmentalist nonprofits, with budgets that collectively amount to hundreds of millions of dollars annually. They include the Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Pacific Institute, Earthjustice, the Friends of the River, and many others.

The body of the Green Goliath is a vast assemblage of constituencies, including the high-tech industry, corrupted cronies and profiteers in all facets of business and construction, the entertainment and media complex, every major public utility, the full spectrum of academia from kindergarten to graduate schools, the financial sector, leftist billionaires and multi-billionaires, and the entire government bureaucracy.

Against this array of institutional might, outgunned and outfoxed, and always, always, playing defense, are California’s trade associations. Examples of these beleaguered institutions are the California Building Industry Association, the California Forestry Association, the California Cattlemen’s Association, and the Agricultural Council of California. These organizations and others fight a holding action against the Green Goliath, losing ground every year.

As for populist rebellion against the green tyrants, entrants are few. The simple fact that “climate change” objectives, even if you believe in their urgency, are not furthered by the actions of the green tyrants, is lost on most Californians. But maybe that can change.

In 2015, the fourth back-to-back dry year in a drought stricken state, after watching 27,000 acre feet of water get released into California’s Stanislaus River to save 23 (twenty three) steelhead trout, one Californian decided to start a movement.

Five years later, with no money, Kristi Diener’s “California Water for Food and People Movement” has 14,200 members on a Facebook group where they share information and ideas dedicated to restoring common sense and humanity to California’s water policies. Based in California’s Central Valley and agricultural heartland, this group includes thousands of farmers, along with families in farm communities on the front lines in the fight against the green tyrants. They are very well informed. But they haven’t been able to stop the ongoing attacks on their lives and livelihoods. Consider this recent post on their Facebook page:

During November [2020], knowing we could be heading into a multi year drought, northern reservoir managers continued to release water through the Delta, and into the Pacific Ocean anyway. Environmental regulations say the flows are necessary to produce a rebound of endangered Delta smelt and Chinook salmon, yet zero of either species have been collected in all of the latest trawling surveys, where they spend several days a month searching in more than 200 spots. This practice of releasing water and hoping fish improve, has been unsuccessful for nearly 30 years. Both species are close to extinction.

Even with little to no rain to speak of in November, an amount of freshwater equal to a year’s supply for 3,031,560 people for a year, was emptied from storage and added to the supposedly rising sea level. It is equal to 987,836,857,560 gallons (987.8 billion) or 303,156 acre feet. Last week State Water Project contractors, who provide water for 27 million people and 750,000 acres of the most productive farmland on Earth, were given their initial allocation of 10%. Put another way, 303,156 acre feet was sent to the ocean for failing fish-saving policies in one month with little rain, while contractors received 422,848 acre-feet to share among 27 million people and 750,000 acres of food production.

This is typical behavior, thanks to the green tyrants, and it’s getting worse.

Beginning in January 2020, pursuant to the California legislature’s recently passed “Sustainable Groundwater Management Act,” Central Valley farmers are required to reduce the amount of well water they use to irrigate their crops. Then in March 2020, California regulators set new rules that reduce how much river water farmers can take.

Obviously it makes no sense to drain aquifers dry, or divert the entire flow of a river for irrigation, but these two regulations hitting farmers at the same time is a perfect storm. Suddenly farms that have operated for generations face the possibility of having to shut down operations. And in to pick up the pieces, flush with subsidies, are renewables “entrepreneurs” who aim to carpet the valley with solar farms.

A Completely New Way of Thinking is Required

It wouldn’t be so bad if more water stayed underground and more water stayed in the rivers, if overall there was more water available. But when California’s rains falter for a few years in a row, it is impossible to satisfy environmentalists and farmers. Invariably, the farmers lose. But why not store more water, to capture storm runoff even in dry years, and to reserve more water in reservoirs that was captured during the wet years?

This is where the environmentalists have forced Californians into a lose-lose scenario. Californians have to restrict their water use, thanks to the environmentalists, but they are also prevented from increasing the supply of water, thanks to the environmentalists.

An example of this is the proposed expansion of Lake Shasta, California’s biggest reservoir, by raising the height of the dam 18 feet. Just with that incremental increase, this steep sided, deep water reservoir would be able to yield a half-million additional acre feet of fresh water every year. This cool water could be used to send pulses down the Sacramento river, helping fish populations, and it could be transported through aqueducts to farmers south of the delta. But environmentalists have used endless lawsuits to block this project for years. It is unlikely to ever be completed.

Down on the Southern California coast, another example of environmentalist power plays out, in the City of Huntington Beach, where a proposed desalination plant has been fighting for nearly 20 years for approval. Despite the environmental issues associated with desalination being thoroughly addressed in the modern design that is proposed, environmentalists have stopped this project in its tracks. It, too, is unlikely to ever be completed.

It’s not just water. The exact same cruel green cramdown plays out in every sector. There are countless examples of how environmentalist litigators and lobbyists have tied the economy of California up in knots, imposing politically contrived scarcity on the people. Until Californians can recognize that they don’t have to live like serfs, that affordable abundance can be achieved while making acceptable tradeoffs between environmental protection and economic growth, the green tyrants will reign supreme in the golden state. So goes the nation?

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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