Lake Mead Keeps Dropping
earthobservatory.nasa.gov
earthobservatory.nasa.gov
I live in San Diego, which basically has no water at all. I was visiting Portland a few months ago and it rained every hour. The whole time I was just wondering “surely a big pipe from here to So Cal, given the dire straits of the drought, has to be doable at this point”.
What am I missing?
"So, like, what can be done here?"
At some point the answer will be water getting cut off and people moving out of these areas - and a better example than the Romans are the ancestral puebloans of Mesa Verde and Canyon de Chelly.
Water is very heavy. Which means moving it takes a lot of energy. Unless it’s flowing downhill, you have to provide that energy.
California is already using something like a fifth of its electricity for moving water around the state. Pumping water from Portland to San Diego would be immensely energy intensive.
That may sound like not much, but farmers buy water in huge quantities. So huge that they are measured in acre-feet. One acre foot is 325k gallons, and sells nowadays for up to $2000 [2], but which historically used to sell for less than $200 [3]. That is 0.006 or 0.0006 cents per gallon.
So just the capex cost of a desal plant is at least 15 times higher than what farmers pay in the middle of a record drought. The aqueducts will cost money to build too, and judging by the high speed rail saga in California, they'll cost quite a lot, probably in the many billions.
So, even if one came with nuclear electricity that's "too cheap to meter", you won't be able to substitute water from rivers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsba...
[2] https://gvwire.com/2022/04/26/drought-ravaged-farmers-pay-up...
[3] https://aquaoso.com/blog/california-agricultural-water-price...
At some point they will have to peel the band aid off.
The people who live in S.D. are what's important.
There's plenty of other states with favorable climates to grow crops in.
The solution is to use less water. That means moving agriculture or humans out of these listed areas.
> what am I missing?
What are you understanding?
You see rain in one place that you visit and think the solution is to pump water back to a different place in which you live? I’m not sure you have thought through this much at all.