The author, who holds a PhD from Caltech, proposes taking advantage of the decreasing cost of solar power to enable a new age of clean water abundance in California, sustainably, with the potential for massive revenues and profits at all steps in the value chain. Even if the author's calculations are off by a factor of two, the proposal looks like it could work. At a minimum, it merits serious consideration. The status quo will not solve our pressing environmental problems.
The main challenge an innovative large-scale project like this one would face, I think, is a regulatory bureaucracy which to me often seems like it was designed for the technologies and infrastructure of the 20th century, not for those of the 21st century. I shudder to think of, say, inspectors who are highly trained on narrow technical matters, but who lack a fundamental, multi-disciplinary, big-picture view of the entire project, deciding whether to approve individual tiny little parts of it.
Skepticism is warranted. The track record of "Oh, we don't have to change our incredibly wasteful and unsustainable ways after all, technology will fix things!" has been... poor.
It's a very interesting idea - but practically speaking, the kind of water volumes needed for drinking and bathing water for a city like Las Vegas are dwarfed by the volumes needed for the farming of sugar beets, alfalfa for dairy, golf course grass maintenance, etc. If current trends in the American Southwest continue, extreme water conservation will have to become the norm (the other alternative being depopulation of the region).
Yeah we can't realistically get better water outcomes by only changing out supply. We have to change our usage too. Farms should be converting to crops that have lower water usage, and food manufacturers should be converting to foods that make use of those crops.
The author, who holds a PhD from Caltech, proposes taking advantage of the decreasing cost of solar power to enable a new age of clean water abundance in California, sustainably, with the potential for massive revenues and profits at all steps in the value chain. Even if the author's calculations are off by a factor of two, the proposal looks like it could work. At a minimum, it merits serious consideration. The status quo will not solve our pressing environmental problems.
The main challenge an innovative large-scale project like this one would face, I think, is a regulatory bureaucracy which to me often seems like it was designed for the technologies and infrastructure of the 20th century, not for those of the 21st century. I shudder to think of, say, inspectors who are highly trained on narrow technical matters, but who lack a fundamental, multi-disciplinary, big-picture view of the entire project, deciding whether to approve individual tiny little parts of it.