I looked at my bill the other day and at the height of summer I'm at -18% of tier one. The goal for Los Angeles is -20% which shouldn't be hard. Now if only they'd give me credit for being -65% in the winter......

This is something I read in separate storys. But,it turns out that Melbourne,Sydney ( and other large Australian cities they said as "others") Tampa and Santa Barbara all built desalination plants..and not a single one was used. Melbourne spent 1 $ billion for a plant to supply 300,000 people.
After it was built the cost of water they realized would go up by 8x. Imagine in Santa Barbara seeing your monthly water bill go from $100 to $800?
The outrageousness of actually building those plants and not use them a day.
All of them built and not used. Stunning waste of money.

Santa Barbara has maintained the permits and now has plans to fire it up for 2017. Our desalination plant here in San Diego (Carlsbad) should be producing by the end of this year. The costs I have heard are closer to 2x with break even in about ten years as water rates continue to rise. The Carlsbad plant will provide about 10% of San Diego's water needs (more if we cut back 25%.) Huntington Beach is still fighting environmentalists. Maybe they will get the permits now with the aid of the drought.

Expensive water is better than no water. The top tier in Irvine is about 10x the lowest tier. Desal water would be cheaper than that.

How did they not do the math on the cost of desalinization until the end? Is it all from cost overruns during construction, bc if that's the case then that money is owed regardless if it gets used. 8x the price of water doesn't seem as outrageous if it is a tiered thing like zeuspaul said.

I haven't really looking into how desalinization works, but can they produce a lower quality water for less money and then have that used for uses other than direct consumption?

I know a lot of people got all up in arms when PG&E installed the smart meters, but I like seeing the hour-by-hour breakdowns of my electricity and gas usage. I really helped me identify where I was wasting energy. I'd love to have a similar thing for water, it could help people identify leaks (pipes and running toilets) and let me show certain members of my family how much water they use in their super long showers.

The retail cost of water in my district is currently $1740 per acre foot. It will likely rise substantially. The wholesale estimate for the desal water from Carlsbad is $2000 per acre foot and it has all been sold in advance. If retail is $3500 then desal would be 2x the cost of current water here in San Diego county. My guess is I will be paying a lot more than $1740 for water above a baseline allocation. Rates have not been published yet but there will surely be a substantial increase. Desal costs don't look that bad for drought resistant water.

The top tier current retail water in the Irvine water district is $12.60 per 100 cubic feet which equates to $5488 per acre foot.

But according to Gov. Moonbeam we need a high-speed train to Fresno.

Seriously, they should of had desal plants built along the coast years ago instead of waiting for a drought. Yes desal plants are expensive but so is that over-priced bay bridge that is defective, not to mention those stupid car pool lanes that nobody uses during rush hour.

How about we build some new damns. I think the last full sized damn was San Luis near Los Banos in the early 60's and our population has gone up enormously since then. We have some years with tons of rain, if we had more ways to store it, we would be in better shape. It isn't the only solution but it sure would help.

Actually- and until now I forgot to bring this up when people say build new dams is, In some soucal areas they have upgraded small dams,adding to the height in retro fitting. That,I saw on California Gold just a few years back. Already those Santa Barbara like communities saw the handwriting on the wall.
They didn't think it would get so bad so fast there wouldn't be water to hold back,I'm sure.
De-sal is more important then any other solution.

Yesterday I used my water meter to check the cubic feet per minute used by each of my 15 different water circuits - it was very interesting and helped me to balance the water usage by making adjustments to the run-time per circuit. It also showed that some drip lines were drawing more water than expected - helped me find a few malfunctioning drippers that were streaming rather than dripping.

I removed part of some drip lines from areas that I plan to renovate in the future, and I plan to run the rest at up to 80% of normal to get to the "target" 25% reduction.

It's nice to have a good sprinkler controller that allows setting of the run time % for each zone. I do wish I had used more Netafim techline and less of the HD raindrip non pressure compensating flag drippers.

Back in the day we here in Santa Barbara had the desal plant on the ballot, we also had state water on the same ballot and a drought with people paying to have their lawns painted green. Both were approved because of panic that we would run out of water. The desalt plant was a temp system in basically cargo containers. Not like they ran out and designed and built a permanent plant.

Once all of this was approved by the voters........it rained. Do you really run a desal plant when your lake is over flowing?

State has been moving towards removing dams that are harming the wildlife (ie, fish kills) as opposed to building more. And what dams are not harmful to wildlife?

Chad, what controller do you use?

My Rain Bird controller is over 10 years old, The closest I found online is this model
Rain Bird ESP-4MEI

Oh,that's right. Santa Barbara's plant is a cargo ship. Basically,its the equivalent of those water purifiers for hikers. Not exactly a home irrigation system. Fills a basic need.
But,Melbourne,Tampa and rest did build state of the art..and never used them.
California can curse that nature is fickle or light a candle. No water is truly not an option.

And let me go on for a minute.- California has 3 or 4x the number of people then Jerry Browns first run during the Disco and Linda Ronstadt days. The population is never going backwards.

Desalination should be like the electric car..the demand and new technology makes cars nothing like the earliest cars (you ever see the first generation Prius on the road? Ugly!) were. I think we might be able to use it all- water flowing through pumps making kinetic energy converted to electricity that runs the pumps,etc. All the Einstein stuff.

I'm a proponent of gas fired distillation plants, the waste steam can be used to generate electricity.

Also- Sacramento homes have no meter. They pay a flat rate and can use as much as they want .The last pre drought study showed they were at 30% above the California average. I remember back in the early 60's my father would let the water sprinklers run all day for the citrus,walnut tree's Bermuda lawns and many types of fruit tree's in summer when we would stay at our old (1919) 2 bedroom home on weekends. A nice vacation from the bay area in Lathrop. Comic books,Stingray bikes,lizards... I loved that place!

Its supposed to change by 2016. For now the and spots here and there in the valley are using turn of the 20th century water grants.

November 4, 2014 election: Prop 1. The largest portion is: Dams and groundwater storage—cost share associated with public benefits--$2,700 (in millions).

flying back from Texas I looked down on all the grass from Arizona to LAX. It's cheaper to replant grass than to water it. I wish we could just let most of the grass go until the drought passes. Keep it for parks where the kids play but let the rest go. Everybody should conserve something. Right now there are people really hurting and asking 35% more from gardeners already being as frugal as they can seems really harsh just because their neighbors waste water on big lawns. Some of this stuff takes years to establish. It's not like grass that can be replanted easily.

I know many of you are making big sacrifices right now and all we can do is hope the weather helps us out because I don't see the govt. asking everyone to help. I worry about California's trees, wildlife, and also fires this year.

Desalination plants aren't the most cost effective answer; recycled wastewater gives better bang for the buck. I was aware of the Orange County program. But even I was surprised at the headline of 'World's Largest'. And that is a several year old article--the program continues to be expanded. If "...the replenishment system uses less than 1/3 of the energy needed to desalinate ocean water, and less than half the energy needed to import water from Northern California.", why is desalination what is being pushed in this thread? HERE is a more recent article about the program. Other counties are on board too, but the whole program needs wider public and political support.

Not obvious from airplanes and in news reports showing green landscape areas is that many of them are being irrigated with reclaimed water. On the ground you can tell by their purple irrigation heads and valve boxes, as well as scattered signs.

I like the recycled water for parks but wish people in our city didn't use drinking water on the grass when the drought is this bad. I wish the recycled water would go to support the groundwater and not watering of grass strips in the roadways or in front of strip malls. Nobody really uses that and the sprinklers spray into the breeze or onto the street.

gyr, why not all of the above? I certainly support recycled water but you first need a supply of water to recycle. Suppliers are reducing our allocations. Desalinate and use the water then process it and use it again. That would reduce the cost of desalinated water substantially. Make a surplus and recharge the ground water. Expand the reservoirs. Capture rainfall. I don't think anyone is saying desalinization will be our only source of water.

The only thing I don't support is thinking small. I don't want someone telling me I have to let my citrus and avocado trees die. There is plenty of water. What is lacking is planning ahead. Put the engineers to work and there will be plenty of fresh water.

Desalination has problems -where to put all that salt one recent report asked?
But,I had read that where they use it...the water is blended with fresh sea water in some ration so that it goes back to the sea only above natural salinity but not near lethal as direct discharge would be. Seems safe.
You have to think near one quarter into the 21st century will give you a better desal plant then when they planned them in 1988.

stanofh, the salt goes back in the ocean where it came from. It is not completely removed from the water. The salinity of the ocean is not affected except in the immediate vicinity of the outfall. Sea life that prefers higher concentrations of salt may thrive in the area of the outfall. Sea levels are rising because of an influx of fresh water from melting snow which more than compensates for desalinization.

Huge amounts of plastic that end up in the ocean are something to be concerned about. Slightly saltier water in the vicinity of an outfall should not be a concern.

I am not against desalinization, but read stanofh's post from April 10 1:53 above. (What a waste of $$$!) They are very expensive to build, take time to construct, require more energy to run (not something available in overabundance nor cheap here, especially since the San Onofre power plant was shut down), can greatly increase the cost of water and have environmental impacts that are not fully known. It is more than just a bit of extra salt being dumped into the ocean--there is a loss of life as ocean water is sucked into the plant's intake, more death of smaller organisms on the filter/screens, and processing chemicals are discharged with the brine (which needs to be diluted with water). California doesn't have a huge influx of fresh water from melting snow during stretches of drought, and fresh water from melting snow far away really is not going to help dilute the brine off the California coast effectively.

None of the proposed solutions are going to be up and running to fix the problems of the current drought. But using a larger amount of reclaimed water in the future will lessen the demand in a more cost effective way during times of drought and plenty. Reclaimed water lowers the demand from other sources, so there is more water available to replenish groundwater during wet years, less is taken from reservoirs and pumped (so there is more available for drought years) and less will be lost due to evaporation during the move from Northern CA to Southern CA.

No, reclaimed water will not fix everything. But what happens if a string of desalination plants are built and never used because the water is so much more expensive than what is available from other sources? There is going to have to be some cost effective ways to have more water for use to offset the additional cost of water from the desalination sources.

Well we just cut our water usage by 50% overnight. It was super easy. All I had to do was realize that my water bill is for 2 months instead of 1 month. Adjusting the formula to:

# Units x 748 gallons/Unit / 60 days = gallons/day

Hurray for maths! I was going crazy trying to figure out where the extra usage was coming in when I was only dividing by 30 days.

How is water only 0.8 cents/gallon? Our tier 3 is 1.3 cents/gallon. No wonder some of the more affluent areas aren't cutting back. If a 25 gallon shower is only 33 cents (at worst)...

It seems kind of ridiculous for the water district to ask me to cut back on water (I replaced my lawn with drought tolerant plants years ago) when thousands of new homes are being built here in Orange County. 10,000 in Irvine, thousands more in Mission Viejo, etc. Most of the new homes are very expensive and are being sold to overseas investors.

gyr, you can always cherry pick. There are a lot of desal plants that are being used including some in California. It is proven technology. The water cost is not 8x the cost. Maybe it was 8x the cost when Santa Barbara was built but we should be using current rates not cherry picking the past. The plant in San Diego will be up and running for this drought. It is ahead of schedule and will be producing later this year with a water cost of about 2x current rates. The water will be used because it has already been contracted for. You will not be able to measure the salinity increase off the California coast because it will be so small except at the outfall. Windmills kill birds and dsal plants kill micro sea life. San Diego is investing in reclamation too but we still need more water. Where do you think it will come from, the sky?

There is a cost effective way to offset the higher cost of desal water. It is called tiered pricing. The cheap water is for base line use. The more expensive water is for my orange trees. If you don't want to buy the expensive water then don't but don't tell someone else they can't have water because you think it is too expensive for them.

zeuspaul, are you a hot topics regular? I don't know why you are being so confrontational. I was only posting about a program that many don't even know is being used. I knew of the reclaimed water, but was surprised OC's was considered the world's largest. I thought others might find the information interesting, too. That is all.

Don't tiered water rates rest on the ruling in the court case? We should hear on that one any day now.

gyr, I get a little excited about water because I like water and don't want to use less because of poor planning. There is plenty of water. I wasn't reacting to your recycling comments. I was reacting to your comments on desal. I sensed that you were trying to find reasons something won't work instead of finding ways to make it work. For example Monterey is drilling wells under the ocean for salt water extraction to minimize marine life impacts. There are ways to improve blending to minimize high concentrations of brine. Just don't say it's a bad idea. There are good engineering solutions.

In San Diego recycled water is about 5% and is forecast to be about 7% in 2020. Desal will be about 10%. I think we should maximize both. 20% desal and 20% recycle would be a good start.

I don't know anything about tiered water rate cases. They are common in electric rates and some water utilities use them too. I don't know how selling water at rates that reflect the cost could be against the law?

I'm not against desalination. but I have been through several droughts. During every one, people look at the ocean and shout how there is our answer. It is part of the answer, but they don't seem to think beyond the immediate. As it stands now, that water is going to cost twice the cost of imported. Want to bet that during non-drought years they will be clamoring to purchase all our water from a source that costs half as much? The public is going to have to accept the comprehensive solutions, and the politicians are going to need to continue support when it is no longer popular. But the public has, thus far IMO, been more than happy to just go back to the old routine as soon as the drought ends.

The tiered water rate case. SHORT TAKE There are quite a few other articles on it, especially since the most recent ruling is expected soon.

Thanks for the link. The law suit is about charging more for water that costs the same as a means to reduce water use. The executive order is asking all utilities to do the same. A ruling may affect the implementation of the state order. However the state so far is leaving it up to the local utilities to determine how to implement the cut backs.

Charging more for water that costs more is not the issue of the law suit. If a utility buys water from a desal plant they can charge more for it.

I believe the public is saying "Why haven't you implemented desal as part of the solution as well as recycled water and rain capture and??" Sure it's a convenient solution and an obvious one as part of an overall solution so why isn't it being implemented on a fast track? We have been in this drought for four years? now. It has been predicted and shouldn't be a surprise to anyone and certainly not a surprise to those we pay to implement water policy. The executive order seems like it has been implemented with no planning what so ever. Our local water board has plans for water reductions that were prepared years ago and were subject to input well in advance of the current drought conditions. The state plan was just issued and has already had significant changes. The state was surprised to find out a significant number of farmers in San Diego are supplied by residential water companies. Isn't it their job to know that?? They are just finding out now? They didn't prepare for mandatory water cut backs? No plans in advance subject to public input? Woke up one day and didn't see snow so they threw a plan together? Who the heck is running the water board?

San Diego has planned ahead. We have added to reservoir capacity, recycled water, contracted for Imperial valley farm water in exchange for water saving technology and built a desal plant. Does any of that count towards a credit in the state mandate? no! We could produce 100% of our water needs from desal and recycle and would still have to cut back 25%!! Who is running the show? Third graders? (no disrespect to third graders)

The state has now decided that water districts that have already conserved don't have to cut back as much. I hope the water districts think the same way for customers who have already cut back significantly. I use almost 40% less water than I did 5 years ago.

Boy, am I sorry I posted about OC's reclaimed water program! You are correct, I read that one last part in your previous post about the tiers too quickly. I don't enjoy debate forums, so I am going to leave CA (threads) for a while and do something useful and more fun, such as clean the shower. :)

All this talk is making me want to read into the technology behind desalinization. It seems like offshore plants using on-site wind or wave power could be a cool combination of technology.

The cost of Santa Barbara desal water according to the LA Times is only about a third more than their imported water.

Desalinated water will cost about a third more than Santa Barbara's imported water because on top of the estimated $40 million it could take to open the plant, it could cost $5.2 million a year to keep it running.

That means water users could see a significant increase in their water bills this summer if the city moves forward. Monthly bills could increase from $78 to $108 for an average household using 1,200 cubic feet. A cubic foot equals about 7.5 gallons.

Well,$78 to $108 is a steal if that ends fines or limits for people who can use all they can afford.
That's another can of worms...

It will have no affect on limits. There is no incentive for desal and no incentive to recycle. They can fire up their plant and recycle but it will have no affect on their required cut back. The cut back is based on per capita water use.

I see,I see. I wonder if that one third is going to be in the range of a large future plant that CAN water a whole city in the future?
btw the 8x I mentioned? that was a quote of what the Melbourne people came up with and like all of you,how they didn't know that before they began I don't understand.

I wouldn't want to use water from Melbourne anyway. It goes down the drain backwards!

That's OK Rhino ,Captain Kirk is coming to the rescue.
A pipeline from Seattle?- pishaaa..

But seriously...fresh river water from above could be a great idea. It's better than putting extra briny water at the coastline to bother the marine inhabitants. They say that a pipeline across the ocean floor will cost about what 2 desal plants would and the water it would supply is 3X the amount that we need on top of what we get naturally. I'd rather have that than converted seawater. Maybe we could make a wine and cheese deal for the extra water just flowing into the ocean.

Sorry I forgot to add from outside CA kristincarol . I know the northern part of CA is suffering too.

Fresh river water from above? Where would you find that? Areas north of SF are in no shape to give away water as they have marginal supplies for the huge population as it is. None of us in the north are in any shape to give our water away, we are careful here and think of others first (like the wild salmon.) Water board came to their senses and in the county where I live we only have to reduce, starting in June, by 4% because our efforts at conservation have been so universally embraced. Rest of the state has a lot to learn about water conservation.

I don't think a pipeline is going to happen. You need a source for the water and Washington has indicated they have their own drought issues and don't have water for California. California is currently dependent on external water and the policy is to reduce dependence on outside sources. The Shatner pipeline isn't based on reality. A forty eight inch pipeline is way too small to make a difference. Perhaps he meant to say 48 foot pipeline but the pipeline has to go somewhere.

A huge pipeline on the ocean floor is going to have environmental issues too. If adding saltier water to salt water from a desal plant is a problem then improve the mixing technology. We are killing our oceans. However the problem isn't salt. The problem is the huge amounts of trash dumped in the ocean every day.

I hear thunder. Finger's crossed! Just planted statice (drought friendly) seeds.

Danvile wont give water to Tassajara Valley,and TV is all on wells as far as know.
Washington I guess could make huge money selling water..except once we have 2 wet and snowy winters in a row,why would California pay for a premium?
At least with Desalination, California sets the price,technology will always improve. In 25 years those who are still around will be amazed at how we once actually ran out of - water????
It will always be there in 2040.

I was corrected on the Melbourne plant. It was 3.5 billion dollars and hasn't been used a day.

Maybe we can get water from one of the trade forums... you know, like in exchange for a sasbe.

I don't know how many remember in the 1976 drought,there was talk of towing Ice Bergs from Alaska.
Soon,we wont even have Ice Bergs.

Public comments to the state water board plan. Find your water agency here.

http://www.swrcb.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/programs/drought/comments042215/