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Comment by dchuk | Hacker News Reader

So, like, what can be done here? Is this just due to a prolonged lack of heavy winters/snow pack (whether climate change related or just a warm period) and will self rectify? Do we need to figure out how to get water piped to the lake?

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?

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> “surely a big pipe from here to So Cal, given the dire straits of the drought, has to be doable at this point”.

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.

Well if we fucked the environment up to get into this problem I guess we can fuck up the environment to get out of it

"I live in San Diego, which basically has no water at all."

"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.

Why should Portland risk damaging its environment to pipe water to San Diego? What about when Reno, Las Vegas, pheonix, Palm Springs, and tiajuana want more water? Should we pipe it to them too?

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.

Nuclear power plants combined with desalination. You all have a lot of water in San Diego, it's just salty.

I don't think that works, unfortunately. San Diego has a large desal plant [1], that cost one billion dollars and produces 100 million gallons of fresh water per day. In 30 years, that's about 1 trillion gallons, which comes to about 0.1 cents per gallon of CAPEX amortization costs.

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...

The farmers situation is unsustainable if they have to be parasitic off of the rest of the country.

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.

Reasonable solution given the Romans were doing this thousands of years ago.

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