Why Any Author Writing About Desalination En Masse Should Not Be Taken Seriously
When I wrote my 4-part blog series on California water reservoirs, I had so much material that I had to pare it down. I kept my recommendations for policymakers at the beginning. What I omitted were the options I ruled out, one of which was building more desalination plants. I never thought I’d need to explain why.
The Abundance writers wrote:
For example, desalination facilities that turn saltwater into drinkable water might be necessary to sustain populations in the American Southwest in this century. This technology is extremely energy intensive.
There are two points to address with this statement. First, they are absolutely correct that desalination is energy intensive. That’s only half the problem — you also have to pump the water uphill! The unit of measure I use for water pumping is “Hoover dams.” The case study in point for this is California’s Edmonston Pumping Plant.
The second problem is sustainability. Just as Greenland’s glacial melt is disturbing the salinity of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC), leading to a climate change tipping point, there are economic tipping points as well. One such tipping point is the exhaustion of aquifers to where they’re unreplenishable. This leads to the question: does it make more sense to live sustainably, or if we embrace the Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson style of abundance, how much desalination would it take to avert the economic tipping point of aquifer exhaustion across the Colorado River watershed?
Let’s imagine what desalination at this scale could look like.
Where Did the Fog Go?
In year 2050 in Northern California, shoppers have noticed something disturbing on their Clover milk cartons — a “missing person” message for Karl the Fog, the beloved fog layer that once blanketed San Francisco. Down in Southern California, Alta Dena milk cartons have a similar missing person message about the Marine Layer being gone. It’s a reflection of the new grim reality of coastal California.
When massive desalination operations began along the California coast to serve the Colorado River watershed, few heeded warnings about brine discharge. Scientists cautioned that dramatically altering coastal water salinity could disrupt the thermohaline current that runs between Hawaii and California — not unlike how Greenland’s melting glaciers are disturbing the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC). By this time, CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) had long since been eliminated through Ezra Klein-style Abundance policies, and environmental impact studies were no longer required.
The consequences of briny water from the massive desalination plants altered the thermohaline currents, pushing warmer waters from between California and Hawaii to the California coastline and preventing the formation of the dense cloud layers that had defined coastal California’s climate. Without their natural moisture source, the towering coastal redwoods began to suffer. Unable to wick life-sustaining water from the air, these ancient giants started falling, one by one, year after year. The once-magnificent redwood forests that survived millennia are now mere shadows of their former glory, with thousands of acres of dead and fallen trees. The lumber industry is rejoicing for the influx of lucrative timber from the dying redwoods, but the environmental toll is irreversible.
This story is fiction, but it is an honest warning of how fragile ecosystems are.
The Crown Jewel of California’s Water Infrastructure
The greatest piece of infrastructure in California is the State Water Project. This system of reservoirs, aqueducts, and pumping plants provides water to millions of people and our agriculture sector. The crown jewel of the State Water Project is the Edmonston Pumping Plant. It pumps water from the California Aqueduct up the Tehachapi Mountains and serves about forty percent of water for Southern California.
To accomplish this, it needs 787 megawatts of electricity. You’d need two of those 2,000-acre, 400-megawatt solar power farms described in the section “Electrify Everything” for the Edmonston alone! I have elected the Hoover Dam to be my unit of measure.
The Hoover Dam, with a full Lake Mead on a good day gets you 2074 megawatts of electricity. In order to pump water up the Tehachapi Pass, we are using almost 38% of the power that the Hoover Dam can generate in an optimal scenario. In a drought stricken scenario like in 2022, the Hoover Dam had only 66% of this production capacity; the Edmonston Pumping Plant would be using almost 57% of the power that the Hoover Dam can generate in a drought scenario.
This pumping plant can serve about 8,700 acre-feet of water per day, and we’d need roughly one-third to one-half of a Hoover Dam’s output to power it. It’s an enormous amount of energy, and this is just one example of the many challenges associated with desalination and water pumping across a generally arid climate and mountainous geography that is the Southwest of the United States.
The Staggering Energy Requirements of Desalination
Let’s put some hard numbers to the desalination fantasy. Consider what would be required to replace Southern California’s Colorado River allocation with desalinated seawater.
For our scenario, Southern California receives about 4.4 million acre-feet annually from the Colorado River, and at 100% capacity, 3.175 million acre-feet from the Edmonston Pumping Plant (in the real world, we usually get about 2.6 million acre-feet) — totaling 7.575 million acre-feet of water that would need to be replaced by desalination. And yes, for those of you asking, “What about the L.A. aqueduct siphoning water from Owens Valley?” It’s about 246,000 acre-feet yearly—a drop in the bucket that will not be factored into the grand scheme of things.
Desalination Energy Requirements for Southern California
| Water Source | Volume (acre-feet/year) | Volume (million m³/year) | Energy Requirement (kWh/m³) | Total Energy (TWh/year) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Colorado River Replacement | 4,400,000 | 5,427.3 | 3.6 | 19.54 |
| Edmonston Pumping Plant Replacement | 3,175,000 | 3,916.3 | 3.6 | 14.10 |
| Total Desalination | 7,575,000 | 9,343.6 | 3.6 | 33.64 |
For 7.575 million acre-feet (9.34 billion cubic meters), the desalination process alone would require 33.64 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. This represents the equivalent output of 1.85 Hoover Dams running at full capacity year-round—just for desalination before a single drop is pumped inland.
But the Colorado River doesn’t just provide drinking water. About 3.2 million acre-feet of that water serves agricultural areas in the Imperial Valley and other inland regions. I will use for reference the Colorado River Aqueduct that has to pump water to an elevation of 1,800 feet and assume we’d need to pump 3.2 million acre-feet of desalinated water that high from sea level to serve the agricultural centers of southern California. Let’s look at the energy required for pumping, borrowing the energy numbers from the Edmonston pump plant:
Pumping Energy Requirements
| Water Destination | Volume (acre-feet/year) | Volume (million m³/year) | Elevation Change (m) | Energy Requirement (kWh/m³/m) | Total Energy (TWh/year) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Colorado River Agricultural Water (1,800 ft elevation) | 3,200,000 | 3,947.1 | 548.6 | 0.0031 | 6.72 |
| Edmonston Pumping Plant (382 m + 600 m lift) | 3,175,000 | 3,916.3 | 982.0 | 0.0031 | 11.93 |
| Total Pumping | 6,375,000 | 7,863.4 | - | - | 18.65 |
Combined Energy Requirements
| Energy Type | Total Energy (TWh/year) | Equivalent Hoover Dams* |
|---|---|---|
| Desalination | 33.64 | 1.85 |
| Pumping | 18.65 | 1.03 |
| Total Energy | 52.29 | 2.88 |
*Based on Hoover Dam’s maximum capacity of 2.074 GW running continuously (18.17 TWh/year)
In total, desalinating and pumping water just for Southern California would require 52.29 terawatt-hours annually—equivalent to 2.88 Hoover Dams running continuously. For perspective, if we prefer modern nuclear technology, this would require approximately 3.5 units of the world’s first fourth-generation nuclear reactor—the Shidao Bay Nuclear Power Plant in China, which produces only 1700 MW today.
This is just one pumping plant for one mountain range. The Colorado Rivers watershed includes Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and California. The number of mountain ranges needed to traverse and the vast distances involved make the energy requirements staggering. While you may get some energy recovery as water goes down a hill, it’s not perfect energy recovery. How many more mountains would it take to serve desalinated water to these inland regions?
The Broader Colorado River Watershed: An Exercise in Absurdity
But why stop at Southern California? The Abundance authors hint at desalination as a solution for the entire American Southwest. Let’s entertain this thought experiment.
Arizona currently uses about 7.7 million acre-feet of water annually, while Utah consumes approximately 4.8 million acre-feet. In order to address the economic tipping point of exhausted aquifers and Colorado River water usage, what if we were to desalinate all of this water and pump it to the necessary elevations (conservatively averaging similar to the Colorado River Aqueduct’s 1,800 feet; and mind you, Salt Lake City is at 4,000 feet elevation), we would need:
Additional Desalination for Other Colorado River Basin States
| State | Water Usage (acre-feet/year) | Volume (million m³/year) | Desalination Energy (TWh/year) | Pumping Energy (TWh/year)* | Total Energy (TWh/year) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arizona | 7,700,000 | 9,497.8 | 34.19 | 16.18 | 50.37 |
| Utah | 4,800,000 | 5,920.7 | 21.31 | 10.08 | 31.39 |
| Southern California | 7,575,000 | 9,343.6 | 33.64 | 18.65 | 52.29 |
| Total | 20,075,000 | 24,762.1 | 89.14 | 44.91 | 134.05 |
*Assuming average elevation change of 548.6 meters (1,800 feet)
Total Hoover Dam Equivalents for Southwest Desalination
| Region | Total Energy (TWh/year) | Equivalent Hoover Dams* | Equivalent Shidao Bay Nuclear Plants** |
|---|---|---|---|
| Southern California | 52.29 | 2.88 | 3.50 |
| Arizona | 50.37 | 2.77 | 3.37 |
| Utah | 31.39 | 1.73 | 2.10 |
| Total | 134.05 | 7.38 | 8.97 |
*Based on Hoover Dam’s maximum capacity of 2.074 GW running continuously (18.17 TWh/year) **Based on Shidao Bay Nuclear Power Plant’s capacity of 1.7 GW (14.89 TWh/year)
Combined with Southern California’s needs, we’re now looking at a total energy requirement of 134.05 terawatt-hours annually—equivalent to 7.38 Hoover Dams or about 8.97 Shidao Bay Nuclear Power Plants. These numbers represent a baseline and are very conservative estimates.
And this doesn’t even account for the other Colorado River Basin states or the extensive additional infrastructure that would be needed to distribute this water across mountainous terrain.
Even if you had unlimited energy provided by fusion power generation, you would have a legitimate case to ask, “are there other less energy intensive ways to provide water to these regions? And do we need to do any of this at all?”
What the Atlantic Meridian Overturning Current (AMOC) tells us about Gigantic Desalination Plants
The Greenland glaciers and ice sheets are melting at such a rate that it is changing the salinity of the oceans nearby. What is nearby Greenland is a critical point in the Gulf Stream, Atlantic Meridian Overturning Current (AMOC). The decreased salinity can destabilize the natural process of warmer saltier water sinking to deeper water as it cools. As the surface waters salinity decrease over AMOC, it weakens this process and is considered a climate change tipping point.
The Gulf Stream is part of the thermohaline circulation that traverses oceans worldwide. So with gigantic desalination plants in this abundant utopian dream, you now have to ask: “Could the thermohaline circulation be affected by a large increase in salinity from desalination?”
The concentrated brine discharge from these massive desalination operations would dramatically alter coastal ocean salinity, potentially disrupting critical ocean currents. As our fictional milk carton scenario illustrated, the potential ecological consequences could become catastrophic.
For politicians ascribing to Abundance, removing environmental regulations would be seen as effective governance. And there probably wouldn’t be anyone around to require an environmental impact study modeling how changes in ocean water salinity might disturb the thermohaline current in the Pacific. Effective governance is what matters, right?
We’d be conducting a massive uncontrolled experiment with our oceans and climate.
Desalinating Abundance
While desalinating Southern California’s Colorado water usage might theoretically give 4.4 million acre-feet back to Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Mexico, it wouldn’t begin to address our fundamentally unsustainable water consumption habits. Even with unlimited energy, the economic and ecological costs would be prohibitive.
It doesn’t take an engineering degree to understand this. Just five minutes of Googling provides a reasonable understanding of why large-scale desalination is a poor idea. So when I see so many captivated by the ideas in Abundance by Klein and Thompson, I think of this toot:
To some, 9 Shidao Bay Nuclear Power Plants or even 18 might seem doable. For me, the opportunity cost makes this seem like a pipe dream and utterly unserious. The authors should desire an effective, big government if they want abundance. China’s style of governance is a shining example of that—a government that has produced nationwide high-speed rail and their own State Water Project, the South-North Water Transfer Project. If they want abundance, nevermind this regulation critique made, go full communist!
I’ll say it again: the greatest piece of infrastructure in California (and arguably the United States) is the State Water Project. It serves millions of people in California; it provides the vast majority of the world’s almonds (unsustainably); it provides a third of America’s vegetables; and it contributes about 13% of America’s agricultural output. It provides the water these California authors used to quench their thirst while writing this book. It is the backbone of the world’s 4th largest economy. The authors did not have to look to Israel or Singapore for examples of water management; they could have looked at what California has done. And they should have! Singapore is a city state with little in natural resources. Israel is a desert nation that does not have much land or natural resource nor does not have water pumping requirements of California let alone the greater Southwestern U.S. The contexts and needs of the Colorado River watershed compared to Israel and Singapore are apples and oranges.
The State Water Project is the shining star of what liberal consensus and central-planning (big government) can promise. They didn’t have to look far and wide from their critical eyes of liberalism failures in San Francisco or Los Angeles. And a market and enterprise-based approach to such an audacious idea would be unrealistic. And at no point do I believe an Ezra Klein Abundance style policymaker would ever advocate for a big government approach for effective government.
Differences in Philosophy
I watched Sam Seder and Ezra Klein debate on The Majority Report. In it, Ezra does point out something ever so briefly but very importantly in all of this discussion: the philosophical viewpoints of E.F. Schumacher. Like E.F. Schumacher, I do ascribe to the view that we are living unsustainably and I may very well have mostly a scarcity mindset. Ezra Klein does not. Ezra probably would challenge E.F. Schumacher on his views to do more to overcome the sustainability problem through a view of abundance. I think I could be more convinced by an abundant view if it came by in a big government approach instead of entertaining a mixture of enterprise and government in a Middle Way style.
I think that does play a significant yet unstated factor in why the American Left are crossed about Abundance.