Sounds like you could use a grant program!Ghost wrote:Yeah, it's not like nobody saw this coming decades ago.Dan H wrote:I wonder if a desal plant running for 20+ years could have kept reservoirs topped off . . .It requires a lot of power, but again, investments in infrastructure usually do pay off in the long run when you need them. Especially in the middle of a desert.
I don't know if that one plant would have made a huge difference, but I am sure that if we'd been spending the last 20 years trying to find ways to make it cheaper instead of crying "It's too expensive," then there would be a lot more plants running now.
Here's what I don't get. Desalinating water is actually very easy -- make it evaporate, collect the vapor, and you have pure water. Right there. That's about as cheap as you get. However, it's also slow. But why can't you collect a lot of water on narrow glass plates and surround the whole thing with mirrors to direct the sun at it, heating them up a lot faster? Put black sponges in between the plates to both air out the water (making it easier to evaporate) and also gather more heat. Set the whole thing up on a sort of conveyor belt that is hydropowered by the ocean itself -- this could actually be a purely mechanical setup with no electrical drain at all (and what you did need to set up electrically could be solar powered). You'd need quite a few of these setups, but you could put them on rigs out at sea, and it would be a massive investment at first...but once they run, all the water costs next to nothing.
Alternatives that would be similar -- use big black pipes filled with tiny tiny pipettes to suck sea water up through capillary action, gathering it up again in a big sponge that is soaking up the sun from 500 different directions at once. Same result, probably a simpler setup, and as long as the sun is out, it will constantly produce. Although this has the problem of quickly saturating the collector with salt, while my other plan would wash that off as the conveyor dunks the plates in the sea.
I'm sure smarter people than me could say why this wouldn't work...but regardless, the CA drought really seems like the most solvable crisis that has ever happened.
By the way, if any of you are going to steal my ideas and submit a patent, can you at least hire me as your training/documentation manager? Freelancing has been slow lately.
Big problem with water is that it's a public, rather than private resource, and we never actually make people pay a high enough price for water. If you make the system totally private, you run into other problems - like poor people dying, for starters. But some sort of quasi-privatized water regime could be in our future.If there were a water futures market, say, you could get funding by people hedging their possible lack of fresh water. Of course, this would also take a huge transportation network, and we'd need something like a national freshwater storage system as well. That would probably require a multistate water compact, where all or nearly all the states agree to move away from ancient water law regimes, characterized by inability to remove water from the system. We need something a bit more sophisticated to encourage technological development - like what you're proposing!
