If only we built reservoirs to keep the water for the drought years it would be great news.
Is it economically important? For sure.
Is it critical for living? No.
Agricultural users should be free to pay market rates for their water like everyone else. They will absolutely still be able to make a profit growing almonds since they basically own the market.
The problem, as others said, is that their cost is artificially low as they don't pay market rate for water.
Considering California always seems to have power and water issues, I’d think combining these things would make a lot of sense. Some of these exist and there seems to be a fair bit of research in the area. I have to image at some point that will be the direction California would need to go. Of course, if they are all-in on solar and wind, then maybe not.
It isn't. Mostly there are environmental concerns.
Show us the data.
What is the price of desalinated water vs water that literally falls from the sky.
They both need to be chlorinated and piped to the end user, but desalinated water is typically at the wrong end of existing delivery infrastructure to take advantage of it.
And irrigators often have things like God deliver much of their water via rain, rivers etc.
So it stands to reason that desalinated water must be much more expensive.
Did reverse osmosis suddenly become energetically inexpensive while I wasn’t paying attention?
Did we build a bunch of nuclear power plants by the coast to use the waste heat for flash distillation?
Did brine disposal suddenly become a trivial issue to solve?
This is sometimes true even in much wetter states, though. I recall being thoroughly surprised to find that out that Virginia (!) has only two natural lakes, one of which is basically just an open area (though a large one) of the Great Dismal Swamp.
I haven't heard of any new desalination projects making headway since. The cost-benefit analysis may favor it, but I'm not sure the politics do. Of course, those politics will probably change in 10-15 years in our next big drought cycle, and then we'll really wish we'd gone forward with more desalination.
Poseidon currently runs a desal plant in Carlsbad. My understanding is that the water the plant releases into the ocean requires exemptions for how concentrated it is. Additionally, the plant draws plankton filled water. Not really what we want in California.
There are better desal solutions out there like OceanWell. They have a deep water desalination solution that solves many of the problems of conventional desal. They just signed a project in Nice, France in the past few days. Also, they are working with the city of Las Virgines over the past few years.
If I remember correctly, the new desal plant in Doheny has a slightly different approach to draw water in from beneath the sand, using the sand as a prefilter. But I'm not sure how that works better than drawing water in from near the surface. I can't imagine how the plankton can possibly escape the suction forces drawing them into the sand.
With these kinds of timelines and that kind of regulatory risk, I don't think large-scale desalination is going to fix California's drought issues, regardless of whether it could.
That’s almost always going to be cheaper to source from a nearby quarry than municipal sorting centres when you’re talk multiple millions of cubic meters.