California City Considers Restarting Desalination Plant To Fight Drought 420
First time accepted submitter SaraLast (3619459) writes in with news about Santa Barbara considering the restart of its desalination plant. "This seaside city thought it had the perfect solution the last time California withered in a severe drought more than two decades ago: Tap the ocean to turn salty seawater to fresh water. The $34 million desalination plant was fired up for only three months and mothballed after a miracle soaking of rain. As the state again grapples with historic dryness, the city nicknamed the "American Riviera" has its eye on restarting the idled facility to hedge against current and future droughts. "We were so close to running out of water during the last drought. It was frightening," said Joshua Haggmark, interim water resources manager. "Desalination wasn't a crazy idea back then." Removing salt from ocean water is not a far-out idea, but it's no quick drought-relief option. It takes years of planning and overcoming red tape to launch a project. Santa Barbara is uniquely positioned with a desalination plant in storage. But getting it humming again won't be as simple as flipping a switch."
Re:now I never looked into it (Score:1, Interesting)
You could build floating rafts/barges that would do this passively. As the water condensates on a clear ceiling, it can be collected and filled into the rafts baffles. Fresh water floats on saltwater. So basically this thing could be filled up, then delivered.
California is just a bunch of greedy idiots who control more of the House than any other state. So they put pressure on the other states to capitulate to them.
Re:A drop in the bucket. (Score:3, Interesting)
They might also ask Northern California to perhaps stop shipping a whole bunch of water to China in the form of really cheap Alfalfa..
The West is pretty much fucked. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:And with that yoiu get POWER! (Score:5, Interesting)
No? It's exactly the reverse. This takes *HUGE* amounts of energy.
Electricity is one form of energy used to power desalinization but certainly not the only form. But you are correct in that the use of electricity to desalinate is not very efficient. A focused solar lens array much like the ones used in solar electric production would be more efficient AND the resulting steam could actually be used to produce electricity as a byproduct. Not enough to be considered an electric generation facility but something is better than nothing.
Re:And with that yoiu get POWER! (Score:5, Interesting)
... or you use pumps to pressurize a bunch of salt water and use a membrane to filter out the salt. Again pressurizing the water consumes a lot of energy.
Couldn't you just drop a container into the ocean, one with only two openings - one with your membrane for salt water in, the other opening for desalinated water out? The deeper you put it, the more pressure outside the container that pushes the salt water through your membrane. Then you could use a low power pump to slowly remove the clean water through a hose attached to the other opening.
Desal as power sink for "idle" wind/solar power? (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the challenges for renewables like wind/solar is being able to generate power when the grid doesn't need it.
Maybe instead of stopping the windmills they should keep them spinning but use desal plants as a power sink for the "excess" power. It's by and large free energy they wouldn't even generate; you might as well generate it and use it to do useful work.
It's debatable whether the excess energy could desal enough water to make a difference.
Re:California = 1D10T Errors (Score:4, Interesting)
eehhhhhhh. Sorta.
The western halves of Nebraska, the Dakotas and Kansas are all half-way to being deserts with rolling sand dunes and all. They need irrigation to support crops. Otherwise they're just grazing land. And not great at that either.
The Ogallala aquifer [wikipedia.org] which happens to be right in that area is indeed shrinking and it's a worry. Conservationists are like "OMG WTF!? that took thousands of years to accumulate" and farmers are like "It's been making my family MONEY for decades, we aint' stoppin". It's an issue for a sizable strip of land, but it most certainly doesn't apply to the majority of the "Great Plains".
The eastern half of those states, all the way to the Appalachian mountains, are plenty wet to support crops without the need of irrigation. Iowa has a "thriving" wine industry in the northeast in a strip of land that avoided being glaicered way back when so it's "weird" by our standards. And there are plenty of apple orchards. Johnny Appleseed is still legendary around here. But certain crops simply need a different climate. You're not going to have a... uh... banana industry in Minnesota.
All in all the USA has a fantastic piece of land for agriculture use and we could grow enough food to end world hunger. But getting it from the fields to hungry mouths has some logistical issues and so we grow feed corn to feed our cattle just so it tastes better. If we every really wanted to be super-dicks to the rest of the world. We'd unleash our capabilities, flood the markets with cheap food for a decade or until everyone else's agriculture industries collapsed and then simply stop making shipments. The Arab spring started with food riots.