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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

We need the transcontinental pipeline to push water to where it needs to be.

Or agriculture needs to move to where the water is.

A pipeline like this is so naive I can't figure out if the op is serious or not. The cost alone would bankrupt multiple states. For example the Central Arizona Pipeline goes from lake Mead to Tucson. That's it. It cost on the order of $10 billion and provides barely enough water to cover the needs of the cities and farmers along it. Doing a pipeline from Iowa over the continental divide and into the Colorado River basin that was big enough to matter would cost hundreds of billions to a trillion dollars.

Forcing water intensive ag to move by actually charging a reasonable rate for water is a far more sensible answer. Just requires political capital.

I don't forsee a transcontinental water pipe going over well. I, for one, refuse to subsidize people who want to live in a dessert with my own water table.

People should live in areas that can support human life.

While I think there should absolutely be limits of some kind, if the water need in places like California could be spread out over the water table of, say, everything else west of the Mississippi, I imagine it could make a big difference to the water-poor places without running the risk of depleting the water-rich places enough for anyone to even notice.

Of course, that's assuming that such a pipeline network would be practical to build and maintain. Personally, I suspect that local desalination will end up being better for coastal or near-coastal areas like California.

The nuclear power + desalination plant combo seems like a no-brainer to me in particular. Even if it meant sticking them in Oregon or Washington (for reduced seismic risk) and piping the fresh water down to Cali.

Nope. Washington/Oregon has the same or greater seismic risk to California due to the offshore Juan de Fuca Subduction zone. Less common, but much bigger earthquakes, and generally we're overdue for one. (return period, low hundreds of years. Last one, Jan 26, 1700, magnitude 8.7-9.2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1700_Cascadia_earthquake)

Does anyone know how the capital depreciation versus electricity cost of desalinization works out? As in, would desalinization make for a good capacity smoother (for solar/wind and the like), where the plant could produce more fresh water while electricity was abundant and then idle when it was not? Or if desalinization is done by something like reverse osmosis then perhaps storing energy as accumulated pressure, while the filter membranes worked full time. It would seem to make more sense than using lithium for grid scale batteries.

The Pacific Northwest does not have reduced seismic risk. It is prone to regular strong earthquakes, both from the subduction zone and from systems of major thrust faults that run through populated areas. Also major tsunami risk since many of the thrust faults run through large bodies of water.

Grow your own food then.

I do have a sizeable garden, and get most of my meat / produce from local farms. I think the only thing I buy from California is pistachios.

> Grow your own food then

You’re saying this to Iowa?

> Iowans spend an estimated $9 billion on food each year; 90—95% of this food is imported into the state.

https://www.extension.iastate.edu/ffed/wp-content/uploads/20...

This is a good point - Californias could start buying fruits and foods from states without water problems, and everyone could boycott California produce.

This would effectively be the same as shipping water to California.

Someone else had an interesting idea: We could set up a transcontinental pipeline to the desert, and in exchange we would receive their solar power.

Well, first of all, most of North America already has an interconnected grid. So if CA has surplus solar generation, we already get it today.

If we wanted to build a dedicated line so that only the places pumping water to CA were getting the electricity, I am skeptical that the economics work out. I'm sure CA is sunnier than the average east coast state, but enough to cancel out all transmission losses and the higher cost of operating a plant in CA?

It's only interesting if you live in the west. It's not a good trade.

There's plenty of solar energy potential in the midwest, along with tons of wind energy potential. We don't need your solar power.

This concept is commonly called "river". Except they go downhill from the rockies, not up. It would be just a tad ambitious to somehow build a second Mississippi but in reverse.

This feels like a bad joke. Apparently Californian farmers have an innate right to water that overrides the water needs of every other state.

This makes sense to me. Water is the most abundant substance on Earth. Build aqueducts and move the water around. If the Romans could do it we can handle it too.

Running a water pipeline across the continental divide and through the Rocky Mountains? Did the Romans do anything comparable to that (move water UP)? I was under the belief that aqueducts relied on gravity to move the water.

A transcontinental I think is feasible, but only if we could do filtering at a massive scale.

Taking raw water from one watershed to another is an environmental disaster.

Too much rain is bad for many crops. Better to move the water

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