I know this sounds crazy, but I don't want to buy in CA because we're running out of water. There seems to be no long-term solution besides the desalination of ocean water.
There are towns[2] in California here people have paid off their mortgage, yet might not have running water in a year.
Super-expensive and massive energy requirements. Its the least efficient way to produce water. Also produces brine-salt waste which is nasty to process or dispose of.
Even these costs pale in comparison to the annihilation of the Colorado River watershed. Desalination would make California produce much more expensive; it might severely hurt the lettuce industry. But it would save the environment of Arizona and northern Baja. Also the energy required to desalinate all the water in a LA house is less than that to heat one in Detroit.
Especially since the rise of solar energy (and tokamak fusion and geothermal) means that electricity is going to mostly get cheaper and cleaner in the foreseeable future.
Exactly! And as "natural" water becomes more scarce, prices will rise, incentivizing investment and innovation in desalination, making it more and more efficient over time.
Desalination has a fixed energy cost that can't be "innovated" away. It requires at minimum, 1kwH/m^3, in a completely 100% energy efficient system (such a perfect system does not exist).
That is the base energy required to boil the water away. Chemistry isn't like software, you can't innovate away the laws of physics.
I don't think our statements are incompatible (there's plenty of room for optimizing capex, even if opex has clear physical limits), but that reminds me of one of my favorite Simpsons quotes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vxHkAQRQUQ
Speaking of water, I came across an interesting post that talks about how much water is consumed to produce common food items. For instance, to produce one banana, approximately 160 litres of water are required.
It's something few people probably ever think about these days, but when you consider not only the food consumed, but also the food wasted every-day and extrapolate these figures onto the amount of water required to produce that food it really awakens you to the extreme demands placed on the world's water supply.
There are towns[2] in California here people have paid off their mortgage, yet might not have running water in a year.
[1]http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_25013388/california-dr...
[2]http://www.newsweek.com/what-happens-when-town-runs-out-wate...