Israeli water-tech flows to thirsty California

◼ Parched California is already working with Israeli industrialists, government experts and academics on advanced water technologies and long-term strategies to lessen the effects of its severe drought. - Israel21

One example is the $1 billion ocean-water desalination plant Israel’s IDE Technologies is building to provide 50 million gallons of water daily in the San Diego area starting in November.

But that’s just a trickle compared to the flood of joint projects that could get flowing in the coming dry years.

...Both Israel and California have strong agricultural sectors. Four-fifths of all water used in California goes to agriculture.

Israel has developed a system for recycling, purifying, storing and conveying treated wastewater when and where farms need it, along with world-renowned drip-irrigation innovations to use the precious liquid most efficiently.

The revolutionary idea of using purified wastewater for farming was pioneered in the 1980s, when Israel’s natural water resources could no longer support its burgeoning agriculture.

Using advanced filtration technologies developed in Israel, treatment facilities remove contaminants to national and international standards. The water then flows to a buffer of 230 reservoirs built by the Water Authority and Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF), from which it is pumped to farmers for irrigation.

Santa Barbara is set to reboot its desalination plant, as other cities look at building their own facilities.

◼ A mothballed desalination plant sits like a time capsule near Santa Barbara's main tourist beach, a relic of California's last drought to end all droughts. - Mercury News

With its control room filled with dot-matrix printers, floppy disks and obsolete computers, the padlocked Charles E. Meyer Desalination Facility represents this quintessential California coastal city's once-fleeting hope of quenching its thirst by tapping the ocean.

Now, 23 years after it closed, with the state entering the fourth year of its worst drought on record, Santa Barbara is preparing to reopen the plant, rekindling a debate that is spreading to communities up and down the coast: Is the state's water shortage now so dire that Californians should embrace desalination -- with its high economic costs and environmental risks -- as a critical element of a pricier water future?

...The plant cost $34 million to build during California's last major drought in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But shortly after it opened in 1992, drenching rains returned. And because the water was so expensive to produce, the city shut down the plant three months later and sold its filters to Saudi Arabia. It has sat, closed, ever since.

Why desalination won’t save California » http://t.co/6Sk8gyZ5Tn pic.twitter.com/vlmL051TCA

— CNBC (@CNBC) April 6, 2015

Instead of building dams, reservoirs and fighting to preserve every drop of water he can for Californians, Jerry Brown has chosen to waste his political capital on a train

California Gov. Jerry Brown orders state’s first-ever mandatory water restrictions http://t.co/JiQ7WeMxX6

— Watchdog.org (@Watchdogorg) April 3, 2015

◼ JERRY’S FOLLY: TURNING CALIFORNIA BROWN TO APPEASE THE GREENS - Assemblyman Tim Donnelly/Breitbart

...Jerry Brown has chosen to waste his political capital on a train that no one wants, which California can’t afford–and he’s stealing people’s land and closing down businesses in order to do it. And now, finally in his fifth year as governor, he finally decides to act on the drought—and, in quintessential Jerry Brown style, he blames those who have nothing to do with creating the crisis and threatens to penalize them if they don’t comply.

Remind you of how he dealt with Sacramento’s addiction to overspending? Right—he blamed us, raised our taxes and threatened to cut our kids’ favorite programs in our schools if we didn’t comply and vote to raise our own taxes again.

In case you missed the news, Gov. Jerry Brown has decided that in spite of his unwillingness to act, you are the problem, so he’s declared a state of emergency in order to grant government even more sweeping control over your life.

Never forget the mantra of the guru of leftists like Brown, or Rahm Emanuel, in the Saul Alinksy tradition: never let a good crisis go to waste, and if you don’t have one, create one.

So in response to Jerry Brown’s massive mismanagement of our most precious natural resource—water—the governor has ordered you to conserve 25% or there will be hell to pay. Mandatory conservation or you will face fines or even have your water cut off....

You’d think if the crisis was as bad as Jerry Brown makes it out to be, he’d have acted long before now. Instead, he wants all of us to pay for his failure to act.

You might remember that when the water bond was first proposed, I was the lone “no” vote. Later, when it came back for a 2nd vote, Brown scrambled to get a Democrat–Wes Chesboro–to join me in opposing the pork-ridden, too-little, too late-excuse-for-a-water infrastructure-bond. He did that to prevent me from writing the opposing argument in the ballot pamphlet delivered to every voter in the state. Instead of my hard-hitting critique, Brown succeeded in getting someone farther left than himself to make a weak, ineffectual appeal.

All this adds up to one conclusion. The failure to act by the most powerful governor in the most significant agricultural in the world, was not an oversight–it was intentional.

By declaring a state of emergency, the governor can take what he’s described as “unprecedented” action. Mandatory rationing is just the beginning.

How Jerry Brown made up his mind on drought order http://t.co/VJMASIQVR9 pic.twitter.com/OMARSSdOp9

— The Sacramento Bee (@sacbee_news) April 3, 2015

With the #California drought, a desalinization plant just might finally make financial sense

With the #California drought, a desalinization plant just might finally make financial sense: http://t.co/3E5kQY5OPo #CaWater

— Jim Boren (@jboren4507) January 4, 2015

The new water plant for the 6,000-resident town of Cambria, a seaside village near William Randolph Hearst's famous castle at San Simeon, will be up and running in early January.

It's one of the biggest infrastructure projects undertaken in response to Gov. Jerry Brown's drought emergency decree last year.

The plant is expected to go online early this month after being finished in just six months, unusually fast in California. Projects of this sort typically take years, and often decades, of environmental reviews, public hearings and lawsuits.

The $1 billion Carlsbad Desalination Project, which will convert as much as 56 million gallons of seawater each day into drinking water for San Diego County residents, is emerging from the sand like an industrial miracle.

◼ Could desalination solve California’s water problem? - Sacramento Bee

...Along this patch of the Pacific Ocean, welders and pipefitters nearly outnumber the surfers and sunbathers. Within sight of the crashing waves, the laborers are assembling what some hope will make water scarcity a thing of the past.

They are building the Carlsbad Desalination Project, which will convert as much as 56 million gallons of seawater each day into drinking water for San Diego County residents. The project, with a price tag of $1 billion, is emerging from the sand like an industrial miracle. In California’s highly regulated coastal zone, it took nearly 15 years to move from concept to construction, surviving 14 legal challenges along the way....

Reverse-osmosis desalination was invented in California in the 1950s. But other nations with fewer natural freshwater supplies – Israel, Australia, Saudi Arabia and others – embraced the technology first and built dozens of projects over the past few decades. When the Carlsbad plant begins operating in 2016, it will be the largest desalination project ever built in the Americas. Desalination on this scale is so new, said MacLaggan, that Carlsbad will be operated initially by an Israeli subcontractor, which will help train a staff of California workers.

The eyes of a thirsty state are trained on this project: It is a crucial test for an industry eager to expand in California, where residents are famously protective of their coastline and also accustomed to relatively cheap water. In short, the Carlsbad project is challenging California’s status quo while also offering the tantalizing prospect of relief from drought.

“This plant can’t come online fast enough,” said Bob Yamada, water resources manager at the San Diego County Water Authority, which serves 3.1 million people and is buying all of the plant’s freshwater production. “It’s droughtproof. That’s one of the most important attributes. It will be the most reliable water source we have.”

...The state has more than a dozen permitted desalination plants, but they are all small. When Carlsbad begins operating, it will produce about 25 times more drinking water than all of them combined...