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Poseidon's adventure
By: North County Times Opinion staff | ∞
Our view: North County's water future in Coastal Commission's hands
The history of the American West is also the history of our engineering ability to divert water from remote to more populated areas. Last week's abrupt shutdown of the pumps in Northern California's Bay Delta, one of the two main sources of San Diego County's water, has given extra impetus to North County's attempt to develop local sources of drinking water -- even if that source is the salty sea.
Since 2000, Poseidon Resources Inc. has been working with local agencies, primarily the city of Carlsbad, to build a desalination plant next to the Encina power plant. That site's main selling point is the seawater the power plant already sucks in to cool its electricity-producing turbines. Poseidon's plan is to siphon off a portion and then force the seawater through filters that remove the salt and make it potable.
That cooling process kills off some sea life, so it requires a special permit. Poseidon is hoping to piggy-back on Encina's existing permit in its quest to supply North County with 50 million gallons of fresh water a day.
Although Poseidon's plans have suffered some setbacks, notably including the county water authority's decision not to participate in the project, it has found a market. About 65 percent of the plant's projected water output has already been slurped up in purchase agreements with buyers, including the Carlsbad, Valley Center, Sweetwater and Rincon water districts. Negotiations are under way with the Vallecitos, Olivenhain, Santa Fe and Rainbow water districts. General Electric, which would supply the plant with a high-tech membrane to filter the seawater, also recently announced plans to invest in the $300 million plant, provided it gets a permit.
The argument in favor of desalination gets stronger with each passing day. Although this time the Bay Delta pump shut-off was temporary, pending lawsuits could make such stoppages more frequent. Water officials say that this situation has added a whole new layer of complexity to an already serious water-shortage problem.
But that's not the only issue. The snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas, which melts into the Bay Delta system, reached historic lows this year. Compounding our water woes, California has seen its share of Colorado River water decreased, and the region is experiencing a drought . Although they haven't yet declared this a formal drought, country water officials are encouraging individuals and businesses to do everything they can to conserve water.
It is against this gloomy backdrop that Poseidon submitted the fourth version of its permit application to the California Coastal Commission on Friday. The Coastal Commission is moving at its customary glacial pace, asking questions like whether it wouldn't make more sense for the desalination plant to move five miles farther from the sea, or whether a new source of water would encourage growth in coastal North County. Memo to Sacramento: We have already experienced a spot of growth; the issue now is whether we'll be able to sustain ourselves in the coastal desert.
Desalination alone won't solve the region's water problems, but it will help us tap an additional, local water source with no prospects for drying up: the Pacific Ocean. The Coastal Commission is on the clock, and we're getting thirsty waiting for its decision.
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Steve B. wrote on Jun 5, 2007 11:20 AM:We are not dependent on Poseidon for water. In this era of prolonged drought and man-made climate change especially affecting the fast-growing West, the federal, state, and local governments are now preparing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars over the next few years on new water sources, wastewater treatment facilities, urban run-off pollution prevention, and power production plants, all of which greywater irrigation systems directly and substantially reduce the need for. The Green Building industry has already proven these systems can replace Poseidon. The Green Building industry is an incubator for ideas, a proving ground for techniques, and a springboard for new industries. For example, they were the first to offer solar panels on homes. When it comes to water, wastewater, run-off pollution, and energy, nothing impacts all of it more than new housing, and nothing decreases that impact more than green building. Homes that adhere to green building standards promoted by the Leaders in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program and similar types of programs reduce their negative impacts by about 50%. That�s a lot of rivers and their flora and fauna not lost to water transfers, or fish to desalination, a lot of sewage not dumped into rivers and oceans, a lot of hydro-carbons not burned and unceremoniously scattered into the breeze for downwind neighbors to choke on. From an environmental perspective, that�s a quantum leap better than the status quo for construction. Traditional wisdom says that making things environmentally better should translate into a lot more cost, but the exact opposite is true in the case of greywater irrigation systems. Here in Southern California, where most of the state�s new residential construction is happening, ornamental irrigation consumes over half of all water used there. Well over half of all water used there comes from elsewhere, causing significant impacts at the source, and expensive mitigation, and requiring a tremendous amount of energy to lift that water out of the ocean and through pumps or over mountain ranges and the hundreds of miles it must travel. Once in the cities, and used, that water must then be expensively treated as sewage, requiring even more pumping and energy, and chemical treatment. Not so with greywater irrigation. A greywater irrigation system reuses the home�s good water � showers, tubs, bathroom sinks and laundry water � onsite, and then only has to pump it several feet out to the landscape, where it seeps into the soil via drip irrigation, with controllers, valves, tubing, and emitters, something people are investing in anyway. This irrigation process keeps half the home�s wastewater from entering the sewage stream, keeps all irrigation water from running off with the pollutants it finds along the way, and substantially reduces supply side and downstream energy demand. Compared to solar panels, which have had decades of R&D, subsidies, and market time, the ROI for a greywater irrigation system is already three times faster. With greywater irrigation systems becoming mainstream, economy of scale will make them equivalent to personal computers for water. Traditional water projects, desalination, for instance, only increase upstream, onsite, and downstream environmental problems and costs. Greywater irrigation eliminates or reduces all of those problems and costs, thus greywater irrigation is the only method with virtually total public support. There is a lot of speculation money being spent on desalination, but that does not make desalination the best idea. Not at all. We'd all be a fortune richer if we picked the low-hanging fruit first. Sincerely, Stephen B.
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