Worsening Drought Shows Need for Desalination

Despite the recent dip in California’s population, it inevitably will start growing again. Those new citizens and businesses will continue to need more water. And state law mandates that they receive it.
Assembly Bill 685 from 2012 proclaimed “the established policy of the state that every human being has the right to safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water adequate for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes.”
With the state once again suffering a serious drought, the only way to meet AB 685’s right to water is to use every available source. A new book on California policy explains a crucial new source is desalinated water. “Saving California: Solutions to the state’s biggest policy problems” is edited by longtime state policy analyst Steven Greenhut. It includes 10 chapters on such policies as education, the environment and homelessness. Authors include Joel Kotkin of Chapman University and Daniel Kolkey, a former associate justice of the California Court of Appeal.
Greenhut himself writes Chapter 5: “Dealing with Drought.” He begins with a quote from famed California author Joan Didion: “It is easy to forget that the only natural force over which we have any control out here is water, and that only recently.”
Greenhut writes: “The state needs to consider many different proposals and ideas for creating more water supply, from increasing surface storage capacity to building ocean desalination plants to commissioning wastewater recycling facilities.”
And he notes desalination is part of the market-based part of the system that makes water transfers and trading easier, while discouraging such government-subsidized waste as growing water-intensive alfalfa in the Mojave Desert.
Of 10 desalination plants currently operating in California, the largest is the Carlsbad Desalination Plant in San Diego County. It’s run by the private Poseidon Water, the leading seawater developer in the United States. It produces 10 percent of county water needs for 400,000 residents.
Poseidon is building another private plant in Huntington Beach, producing about the same amount of water. It should be ready next year.
A great benefit of private plants is they don’t add any burdens to state or local government budgets. However, Greenhut urges the governor and Legislature need to clear “regulatory hurdles that delay desalination and other water projects.”
He also cautions that conservatives, who usually favor more growth, sometimes don’t realize the importance of new desalination plants “because they want to first build more storage. We’re dealing with a political world of real-world choices and frustrating obstacles. We shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The goal should be abundance – and end-users should, as much as possible, pay for the actual costs of the water.”
As to the objections of those more on the progressive side, he points out, “There’s nothing wrong with prioritizing the needs of people, while still paying attention to habitat restoration. More water allows us to deal with all these priorities. … The question comes down to costs v. benefits for each particular proposal, but our approach ought to be laser-focused on feeding more water into the system. Water recycling, in particular, is cost-effective and unobjectionable.”
An adequate supply of water means low-income Californians won’t be stuck with price increases they can’t afford. That fits in with another piece of state legislation, Senate Bill 200, signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2019, whose wording says its purpose is “to help water systems provide an adequate and affordable supply of safe drinking water in both the near and long terms.”
Californians have a right to safe and affordable drinking water – it’s the law. As the book “Saving California” details, desalination is a key part of guaranteeing that right.