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Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

It's time for a national water grid. The climate is changing and we need to be able to rapidly adapt. We can't afford to let sections of our country turn into a dustbowl while others flood.

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4785

https://www.osti.gov/biblio/963122-national-smart-water-grid

Yes, there are wasteful water practices that need to be addressed as well.

Yes, there are ecological impacts that need to be accounted for.

We need to think big. Our generation doesn't seem to have that sort of vision anymore. We need to prepare for a changing climate and a larger population. A water grid provides our nation with food security and helps mitigate a major effect of global warming.

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I agree this should be looked into, but one issue is that moving water uses energy, since water naturally flows downhill, and pushing it to where it doesn't naturally flow goes against entropy.

In California, we already spend 4.2% of the state's power on pumping water. This percent will increase if the water has to run uphill and/or cross mountain ranges. http://ww2.kqed.org/climatewatch/2012/06/10/19-percent-calif...

When you pump water over a hill you need energy to pump it up and can retrieve some of that energy when it flows down hill. That's why CA uses some of its reservoirs as hydroelectric storage batteries, pumping water up when electricity is cheap and letting it flow down when electricity is expensive.

https://www.sdcwa.org/projects/san-vicente-pumping-facilitie...

Reservoirs and pump using renewable power would offset that somewhat.

Particularly you site the pumps near the renewable and they wouldn't necessarily need to be "on grid".

The energy required to pump water UP to the elevations of much of the southwest is astronomical. Huge parts of it are at 5000-7000', so even if you manage to avoid actual mountains, you still have a huge lift from either the coast or the Missouri/Missippii rivers. I have no doubt that there would be ways to move some water in such a manner, but not much.

If you bring water in from the rest of the US and supply the regions which depend on the water flowing down from the mountains you allow the high altitude regions to retain more of their water.

Sure, that means you generate less hydropower in the downriver dams, but overall I think it's a wash(pun intended).

Pumping seems like something that could run intermittently with renewable energy. Have to overbuild capacity I suppose.

We need to think big. Our generation doesn't seem to have that sort of vision anymore.

I personally have 0 hope for it. We're an entire generation removed from the Cold War, an era where governments actually did shit. And in the 30 years since, it's done nothing but shatter trust in every way (and in new ways!) imaginable.

Moving water around a grid like we do with electricity is prohibitively expensive. We need to move people instead. Cities in deserts are just not sustainable.

Cities themselves seem in reasonably good shape. Commercial agriculture in deserts, created in the wake of the fever dreams of the Bureau of Reclamation after two of the wettest decades ever (1900-1920) ... much less so.

Deserts are usable land if you bring water. You can grow food and manufacture things. Are you saying we should just let the deserts be empty and non-productive? Where do the people in the cities get their food from?

They're pretty good for solar and wind farms.

Sure, but people can live underneath those solar and wind farms. OP seems to want to move everyone out of the desert for some reason.

This is my thinking as well.

Maybe it would be cheaper to build water pipelines + green powered desalination + pipe water from the great lakes or wherever it's in abundance. Especially if we can't or won't move crops? It seems like that growing environment artificially watered does improve yield?

Maybe it will happen if we accurately price water, just like we need to with oil, so that the incentives actually align with the bad consequences of the status quo.

I wish the infra bill spent most of the money on green energy and plans like this. Spending it on cars and fortifying against floods and weather seems like a losing battle if we don't fix the underlying driver of this chaos.

Let's leave the Great Lakes where they are. Thank you very much. It's not their fault people decided to live in the desert.

Why are people in the Great Lakes region so paranoid about their water? There are many sources of freshwater in North America. Would you have a problem with reclaiming some of the St Lawrence outflow before it reaches the sea?

By establishing a national water grid, you reduce the likelihood that the Great Lakes will be damaged by water use. You allow the Great Lakes to be replenished if there is ever a climate driven drought. You allow water to be taken from the mouths of all of the great rivers in North America, reducing the burden on any single one of them.

> Why are people in the Great Lakes region so paranoid about their water? There are many sources of freshwater in North America.

“Why are the people of the Colorado river so paranoid about their water” might have been a theme 60 or 70 years ago. I guess the answer is: because once that exploitation starts, it will only intensify in the future.

The "Slippery Slope" is NOT a fallacy. Its how things work today.

yeah, the great lakes have enough problems.

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