The norcal/socal divide caused by the river is funny to me. I grew up in LA, then moved to the Bay Area for college. In LA we never really talked about where our water comes from. But we were always 'in a drought' and always taught to conserve water.
My wife grew up in the Bay Area, and was told the same.
But her family is from Sacramento. Up until about 15 years ago, everyone in Sacramento paid the same for water (based on square footage of your home). There were no water meters. So they didn't conserve. They ran the sprinklers in 100 degree heat for hours, they washed sidewalks with water instead sweeping, and all the other things.
But when the meters came, her Uncle blamed SoCal for "stealing his water". He complained every month when the bill came about how he has to pay more now because of SoCal.
By jedberg 9 hours ago
Owens valley, where LA "steals" water from, is on the eastern side of the Sierras.
NorCal, including Sacramento, is on the western side of the Sierras.
So unless they planned on pumping the water over/under the mountain range that surrounds it in every direction except for towards LA, that water was never available for any NorCal city to use.
By kenhwang 9 hours ago
The California Aqueduct delivers water from the western Sierras through the Central Valley and to Los Angeles. This is likely what NorCal refers to when they say SoCal is 'stealing our water'.
Would be interesting to see the relative amounts of use by LA and by agriculture in the Central Valley though.
By mutagen 8 hours ago
SoCal does, yes; about half the water going through the SWP from NorCal, or ~75% if you include Bakersfield/Kern as part of SoCal (though most would consider it Central Valley).
But SoCal isn't only LA. LA itself gets a bit less than half of their water from MWP, which manages the water from the SWP and the Colorado. About the same amount it gets from the the eastern Sierras. These are supposed to drop to ~10% of LA's water supply as recapture/recycling projects complete.
Or computed the other way around, LA only has rights to ~20% of the water managed by MWD. Of course water supply, distribution, and rights are all blended and traded around all the time, but generally speaking it's not "LA" using up that water from NorCal, the consumption is significantly more from the cities and farms that came after.
tl;dr: Urban water use is tiny. In NorCal, the vast majority of the water flows unimpeded to the sea. In the Central Valley, most water is used for agriculture. Agricultural water use in any one of the 3 major basins in the Central Valley is more than all urban areas in California combined. Unsurprisingly, urban use is the primary one in the SF and LA areas, but the absolute totals are very small compared to total CA water supplies.
By nostrademons 8 hours ago
Not just agriculture but highly water intensive agriculture like almonds. Also I read that a lot of laws about water in some US states contain so many grandfathered clauses that few people 'control' a lot of water use, not sure how much.
By newyankee 2 hours ago
Owens valley is basically dried up from the water that LA takes. It's interesting as you drive in the towns in the Valley and you see all the LA Department of Water and Power offices over 200 miles from Los Angeles. The courts had to force the LA DWP to quit taking too much water from the streams that feed Mono Lake as it was in danger of drying out.
By vondur 7 hours ago
Yep, Owens valley is basically an environmental disaster created by LA. So in the grand scheme of things, buying water from NorCal is better than stealing from the Owens valley through antiquated water rights.
But really, California (and really the entire Western US) needs a water rights governance overhaul. Right now the focus is all on urban water use, which is practically negligible compared to the agricultural water rights usage.
By kenhwang 7 hours ago
That's a money play too. Some of the best farmland in the world is now the endless subarban Boston->DC corridor.
We created the miracle on the desert, and billions were made in real estate.
By Spooky23 4 hours ago
Much easier to tell Joe homeowner he's not allowed to have a lawn than to close down the country club. Where would the rich relax then?
By paradox460 6 hours ago
The country club is also negligible compared to agriculture. Farmers are politically not an attractive punching bag though.
By ashdksnndck 4 hours ago
It isn’t dried up, they maintain a certain water level in the various lakes.
they are saying that LA takes water from sources which would otherwise drain into the sacramento and san joaquin river delta. The video from this post mentions the California State Water Project which takes water from the Feather River (Oroville Dam) and distributes it along the Western edge of the central valley South to Bakersfield where it is then pumped over the mountains both towards Los Angeles and further East to San Bernardino and Riverside. It provides way more water to SoCal than the two Los Angeles-specific aqueducts from the Owens Valley on the Eastern side of the Sierras.
Old men yelling at the sky don't often seek rationality or nuance in their cries.
By dpe82 7 hours ago
I grew up in Sacramento and I remember when my parents were had a flat rate water bill. Those were the good ol' days!
It frustrates me how everyone moralizes water use rather than accepting that free markets allow for people who are simply willing to pay for it. For example, if you live in Sacrmanto and don't have a pool, you're just doing it all wrong (in my opinion, of course).
I watched my friend's family farm in Modesto flood their fields to irrigate them. No meter, just a valve off the canal and they pay a flat rate. So it offends me that my shower head is legally required to restrict it's flow. Or that neighbors decide that a pile of rock in the front yard is "better for the environment" as it radiates heat on a 105°F day...
By ccorcos 2 hours ago
Yes, Norcal spent decades wagging fingers at SoCal about this. There were books like Cadillac Desert.
Meanwhile, San Francisco drinks clean glacier water that a valley in Yosemite was destroyed to provide this and they refuse to repurpose a downstream damn that has enough capacity to do it.
Physician, heal thyself.
By jsLavaGoat 7 hours ago
Can you clarify what you mean by: “they refuse to repurpose a downstream dam”
California has insufficient water storage to meet demand, it’s not like we have huge dams lying around that we leave empty when there is water available to fill them.
You might be referring to Don Pedro dam - but we are already filling that up (modulo what we need to keep empty for flood control). SF has some contractual right they could possibly exercise to water in Don Pedro but that doesn’t magically result in California’s water supply being held constant if we stop storing water in the Hetch Hetchy. If SF gets the Don Pedro water, that means someone else that was going to get it is deprived.
Now, you could argue that the state can get by with lower storage because ag needs to consume less or more groundwater recharge or whatever, but that’s a different question.
By ashdksnndck 4 hours ago
Crystal Springs isnt anywhere near Yosemite if that is what you are referencing. That being said it supposedly was gorgeous and almost as amazing before being filled with water
By Melatonic 6 hours ago
Not Crystal Springs. Hetch Hetchy, the damning of which legendarily caused John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, to die of a broken heart.
By jsLavaGoat 5 hours ago
It’s a nitpick but the words you are looking for are “dam”, “dammed”, and “damming”. Damning is a very different thing entirely.
By stouset 5 hours ago
They both work, really
By CalRobert 4 hours ago
They are referring to Hetch Hetchy.
By dontlikeyoueith 5 hours ago
Is it really considered the Cascades all the way down near LA? I thought the mountains down there were the Sierra Nevada? Did Grady just get that detail wrong, or am I wrong in thinking that the Cascades stops in Northern California?
By rootusrootus 14 minutes ago
Looking at what Tehran is facing (not related to the war, water shortage), I'm wondering why california isn't investing in more desalination for SoCal, especially for LA.
But there are only a few in SoCal and they're for smaller communities like carlsbad or santa barbara. So it is there and it is working for some, why not more? naturally i assume it's because everything costs more at the coast.
I don't understand the financial concern at all. How could increasing the water supply increase the price? It only makes sense to me if the price is artificially low right now.
Environmental damage by a desalinization plant couldn't possibly be worse than overdrawing the acquifer -- the defacto solution.
By peterbecich 5 hours ago
As part of the contract for construction, the county or city must buy a certain amount of water every year.
Because desalination is not economically feasible, the water is more expensive and this extra subsidy raises the cost of the water bill.
This is how it works for the facility in San Diego County.
Building a desalination facility is economically hard to justify because the break-even point seems far away. It also assumes the state won’t eventually create a state-wide solution, which would benefit from a state-level economy of scale that a city/county effort might not.
By harrall 2 hours ago
Building an industrial facility in california is much more difficult and expensive due to numerous regulations.
By daedrdev 5 hours ago
> I'm wondering why california isn't investing in more desalination for SoCal, especially for LA.
Because California has plenty of water for residents. What California doesn't have is plenty of water for agribusiness.
And the agribusinesses do NOT want people paying close attention as all the valid solutions to water problems are basically "shut down agribusinesses in arid areas".
By bsder 5 hours ago
people are always trying to conserve water, and droughts have been a plague for the past few decades. Even if the agriculture is taking up all the water, it doesn't change how water scarcity is a a very real part of socal life. You don't have to shutdown agriculture elsewhere, and it is a vital part of california's economy, that's just a lazy solution. I can get behind getting the agriculture industry to finance partly the desalination plants so they can free up the fresh water via the aqueduct.
In the unlikely event california becomes independent, water rights will be a big deal too, those natural water sources won't be so reliable without nevada's cooperation.
By notepad0x90 2 hours ago
> You don't have to shutdown agriculture elsewhere, and it is a vital part of california's economy, that's just a lazy solution.
Agribusiness is under 2% of the California economy and an even smaller employer. You could wipe it completely out and the state would barely notice.
And nobody is saying to wipe out actual food production. Mostly people want to stomp on things like growing and exporting alfalfa (which is effectively exporting water for all intents and purposes).
> droughts have been a plague for the past few decades
Droughts have been a plague forever. Quoting Steinbeck from East of Eden:
“During the dry years, the people forgot about the rich years, and when the wet years returned, they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
By bsder an hour ago
Being from LA, I am used to a water system that works without needing power. I think most of CA is like that. It was a surprise to lose the water back east when the power went out during a storm.
By gorfian_robot 11 hours ago
The only places I've heard of losing water during power outages are houses that use a private well (no power, no well pump), which would be the case anywhere. Municipal water systems may or may not use power to provide pressure, but are going to have generator power outside of the most severe outages.
By macNchz 9 hours ago
Also, water towers. As long as the power isn't out long enough to deplete the tower.
By MrZander 9 hours ago
Apartment buildings often have pumps to increase pressure in the basement. Without power, the higher floors lose water.
By mono442 3 hours ago
I wonder if this was in an apartment building. We owned a condo in a 5 story (4+1) apartment building and because it was taller than the San Jose water system was built for, our building needed (electric) pumps to provide water pressure to the building (there were tanks on the roof). If we lost power, then we lost water.
Now that we have moved to a 2 floor detached home (also in San Jose) we do not have that issue, and everything is gravity fed.
By larkost 9 hours ago
Do you lose water in the whole building, or just those apartments above the water-line?
By fhdkweig 9 hours ago
Usually these relatively low height kinds of top-tank systems lose water for the entire apartment building, because there's one pump to raise the water to the tank, which then passively provides the pressure (usually through pressure regulators at each floor if I remember right).
Larger buildings tend to have multiple independent systems
By jaggederest 6 hours ago
We happened to live on the top floor, so I don't have personal experience for the lower floors, but the communication on the (non official) group chat for the building always hinted that any water outages (we had a few non-power issues with the pumps as well) applied to to the whole building. But thinking back that could be an unfounded assumption.
By larkost 9 hours ago
The LA water system is dependent on power as a whole. There’s many pumping stations along the various aqueducts.
By duomo 10 hours ago
We do not lose water on the east coast when the power goes out
By tjwebbnorfolk 7 hours ago
It depends where you are. Most cities in the Northeast you are correct. But coastal areas, big swaths of New Jersey and Long Island IIRC are definitely dependent on power. Towns with water towers usually pump it from the ground.
Alot of suburbs that can't or won't hook into city supplies will sometimes need more active measures to filter their water as well.
Sanitary sewers are heavily dependent on power.
By Spooky23 4 hours ago
I know NYC doesn't treat their water at all, but LA doesn't either?
My city runs on surface water, so we have treatment and then pump to storage tanks. You would have to be out for quite a while to run the city out of water, though - the tanks are large.
By devilbunny 10 hours ago
LA definitely treats the water. Both the surface water before consumption (I'd be surprised if any city doesn't do this) and the wastewater, for reclamation for nonportable use like irrigation, and for recycling back into the general clean water supply.
The aqueduct water is specifically purified by the Los Angeles Aqueduct Filtration Plant. That plant is gravity fed, but it doesn't operate without power.
LA just has the advantage of having mountains in the city, so it's cheaper building more elevated water storage so the capacity lasts longer during power interruptions (which are also not as common or extended as they are in the east). They will still eventually run out if they're not replenished by powered pumps.
By kenhwang 10 hours ago
Where did you get that idea about NYC water being untreated? NYC treats its water. Chlorine is added if and when needed. Testing stations exist to evaluate water quality all around the boroughs, etc.
You can't have a city of millions of people and have the water be potable from the tap without testing and treatment
> New York City’s water (including drinking water) is unfiltered, making it the largest unfiltered water system in the country. Were New York to begin filtering its water, it would cost the city approximately 1 million dollars per day to operate the filtration plant.
They have hundreds of sampling stations to check daily.
He was talking about the drinking water that comes from the faucet, not the sewage.
The untreated NYC water has tiny crustaceans in it, which make it not Kosher, which is why thee bagels from a Jewish deli in NYC are so good. Go figure.
Thanks for the correction, I should have looked harder at that page before posting. I've since corrected.
By mikestew 9 hours ago
There's no way the water is untreated. Like just about everywhere else on earth, they will add chlorine when necessary.
By markdown 6 hours ago
Odd. Most places use water towers to provide water pressure and have backup generators for the pumps that fill them.
By UltraSane 6 hours ago
Sometimes it feels like the US has lost its appetite for grand structural projects like that. Maybe it’s just that I’m unaware of them and that impression is the result of survival bias, but given how impossibly hard it is to just build anything where I live (Seattle), I’m not so sure.
By strongpigeon 10 hours ago
Seattle just got done building light rail tracks over a floating bridge.
It is an insane engineering achievement. A train literally running on tracks on a road that is floating on water!
By com2kid 10 hours ago
The achievement is the speed the train can run at. Trains going over the old floating railway bridges that were part of the Milwaukee Road had to slow down dramatically to, iirc, 6 mph.
Of course those were first built in the 19th century.
By Aloisius 20 minutes ago
Fair. Maybe I'm too much if the weeds of this because all I can think of is how much of a fight it was to pass ST2 and ST3 and how we haven't even started on the Ballard line despite voting for it in 2016 (10 years ago!) and how it might be delayed forever.
By strongpigeon 9 hours ago
I get that it is neat but it's hardly the Hoover dam is it?
The water systems for LA and San Francisco are really quite audacious even if they have less technical complexity than floating rail.
I've built ML systems way more complex than any of these but it's still way less ambitious and audacious.
By creddit 2 hours ago
No, it's not an insane engineering achievement. It's just a normal one, because nobody else has floating bridges, nobody else needed it. It's also years late and costs 10x more than it should.
It's also the wrong stupid technology. The trains are constrained on space because of the low-floor bullshit. It's the longest light rail in the country, it's too fucking long and slow. Even if we fully built out ST3 it can't handle more than ~20% of commuters. It can't be expanded with express tracks because it's built deep underground, so the commute is so much slower than the equivalent in other countries and will NEVER compete with the automobile except during peak rush hour. The northern stations are next to the freeway so over half the land that could be transit-oriented development can't be, and then what's left is devoted to parking anyway. Complete, total waste of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, built and planned by people who don't and won't ever use transit.
That 10x cost directly makes it so we can't build out our system properly and we keep building out car infrastructure because people would rather have a car and save 2 hours a day commuting.
By coryrc 8 hours ago
> No, it's not an insane engineering achievement. It's just a normal one, because nobody else has floating bridges, nobody else needed it. It's also years late and costs 10x more than it should.
Your other points aside -
Doing something no one else has ever done is the definition of an engineering achievement.
There isn't a set of best practices. There aren't a bunch of off the shelf parts, there aren't any contractors who can help you out because they've done it a dozen times before. It is an original engineering challenge.
Pulling it off is by definition an achievement.
That said, 100% agree about the station placement. Heck the stations that are well placed were poorly designed, they should be profitable by including commercial real estate and residences, with the revenue from both going to Sound Transit to pay for the system.
But no, we didn't do that and I can't even get a cup of coffee, in Seattle, at our light rail stations.
By com2kid 7 hours ago
I said it was, just not an "insane" one. It's not the Hoover Dam. Trains get on to boats all the time. It's innovation.
Oh yeah, and we hamstring ourselves because every extra property can only be used for "affordable" housing and we paid top dollar for it, then limit how much it can be used and tie up prime property which could have been used for more purposes. Gee, why is everything so expensive!?
By coryrc 3 hours ago
> Oh yeah, and we hamstring ourselves because every extra property can only be used for "affordable" housing and we paid top dollar for it, then limit how much it can be used and tie up prime property which could have been used for more purposes. Gee, why is everything so expensive!?
Yeah everything surrounding what sound transit was forced to do with their finances sucks, which is why I have a lot of sympathy for the people trying to run ST and maintain its budget.
Everyone complains ST is bleeding money but the voters passed the laws forcing the finances to be terrible.
But every time I post that Seattle needs to dramatic loosen up building restrictions, it pisses everyone off.
Everytime I say things like "we should just do what cities running a good budget and that have affordable housing are doing" people get upset.
The curse of being an engineer. "Do the thing that makes the numbers work out" is rarely a popular opinion.
By com2kid an hour ago
I don't think you're wrong. Every time someone says we can't do high speed rail it makes me very sad. And as far as Seattle goes... my commute is substantially affected by the I-5 closures. It's somewhat shocking to me that we allow infrastructure to decay as much as we do.
I'd be happy about the light rail expansion if they weren't talking about delaying the Ballard line indefinitely. :(
By BryantD 10 hours ago
The commute is slow because the light rail is slow. It's the wrong technology for commuter rail and there are too many stops. (I'm assuming you live north).
Can't do highspeed rail because it's too impractical and expensive, while we're spending a west coast highspeed rail network worth of money on the least popular war in US history.
By zardo 9 hours ago
California is spending the money and what they're building is useless (oh big passenger demand from Merced to Bakersfield, fuck right off with that) and costs 10x what China, France, Japan, etc pay.
By coryrc 8 hours ago
Evidently tax cuts for the wealthy are more important than infrastructure.
By amanaplanacanal 10 hours ago
This particular grand structural project was never a good idea, as the video describes. So it might not be the best basis for comparison.
The grand projects the US has embarked on have been completed using unethical means and without regard for real environmental consequences.
By oatmeal1 3 hours ago
also they were completed during a time of much less housing density and eminent domain laws were more powerful - even getting a railroad setup nowadays costs billions because of land purchasing
By stringfood 2 hours ago
Those projects would literally be impossible today with the environmental regulations in place, especially in California.
By rabid_0wl 10 hours ago
If you watch the OP, you'll see that the construction of this aqueduct caused billions of dollars worth of environmental devastation. Rail all you want against regulations, but when an argument boils down to "I wish we didn't have to internalize all these costs and could just push them off on someone else", I'm not especially sympathetic.
By kibwen 9 hours ago
LA has paid billions to remediate, but the actual cost is incalculable. Not sure who is "railing against regulations" but there are obviously downsides to heavy environmental regulations. Debatable if CA is striking the right balance.
By rabid_0wl 8 hours ago
Certainly that’s part of it, but also just NIMBYism. Los Angeles were able to defeat the Owen’s Valley farmers back then, I don’t think they would be now.
By OskarS 9 hours ago
We're literally right now building a huge high speed rail project that is planned to link san diego to san francisco through LA, bakersfield and fresno. Progress is made on it daily. https://www.youtube.com/CAHighSpeedRail
By schlauerfox 8 hours ago
And when did that project start and how much has it cost and how far can you ride on what they've completed up until now?
By jimbokun 6 hours ago
This is a joke, right?
By bobanrocky 2 hours ago
Rejoice. It will be the world’s slowest and most expensive “high speed” rail.
So slow, in fact, many countries have faster regular rail.
By testing22321 4 hours ago
That may be true for some twisted definition of "building". Most people would say the money is simply being wasted by bureaucrats, consultancies, etc.
By baggy_trough 4 hours ago
Progress is made on it daily? Great. How soon can I ride it?
By AnimalMuppet 8 hours ago
The initial segment in Central Valley has current date of 2032. It depends on if federal government restores funding or if California has to fund itself.
Phase 1 from SF to LA is estimated for 2035-2040. They might do end-to-end service before that with existing tracks and slower speeds, especially from Palmdale to LA. The SF and LA segments require tunneling to get over the mountains.
By ianburrell 2 hours ago
Caltrain, from SF to SJ, is part of the California high speed rail system, and you can ride it right now. It's now electrified at 25KV, welded rail, concrete ties, and compatible with high speed rail. The Stadler trains are capable of 125MPH but are run slower because there are so many stations.
By Animats 4 hours ago
If you are claiming that Caltrain is part of the grand high speed rail system, you are literally being taken for a ride
By bobanrocky 2 hours ago
The track is. That's how the SF connection is supposed to be made.
By Animats 2 hours ago
It’s too complicated to corruptly make money off of a large project like that. It’s much easier to just buy a bunch of drugs and needles and give it to the methheads, or spend money on homeless while building zero homes.
Also I love when they refer to it as the "_First_ California Water Wars" in a grim realization of the future of water scarcity in the West
By z3ugma 10 hours ago
There is no water scarcity in California, only misallocation. The vast majority of our water is heavily subsidized and used for agriculture, and a substantial amount of those crops are grown for export, yet agricultural exports makes up an insignificant part of California's economy.
We could end all California water scarcity talk today, with no impact to food availability for Americans, by curtailing the international export of just two California crops: almonds and alfalfa.
By hamdingers 9 hours ago
Anecdotally, my friend's grandma was an almond farmer. As they drove past a river in the Central Valley, she exclaimed "Why is there water in that river?! Those could be watering my almond trees!"
By SCUSKU 9 hours ago
In Arizona we grow alfalfa as well -- it's mind boggling to me that in places where water is so scarce we use so much of it on such a low value crop.
By dclowd9901 5 hours ago
That alfalfa gets extensively exported as livestock feed... and alfalfa is literally mostly water by weight. So the arrangement is literally shipping out local groundwater in bulk to other countries.
By crooked-v 5 hours ago
So why hasn’t that been done? Have some representatives and senators set limits on almond exports. Surely they wouldn’t be voted out in the next election given how farmers are outnumbered.
By kccqzy 8 hours ago
Because farmers are making money off of exporting and have significant lobbying power
By patmorgan23 8 hours ago
Bold of you to assume that ordinary voters matter more than Billionaires like the Resnicks of The Wonderful Company.
By markdown 4 hours ago
Almonds are climate-appropriate product and valuable. Alfalfa can cheaply be grown off rainwater in the Midwest and it alone frees up sufficient water.
By coryrc 8 hours ago
The problem is alfalfa is expensive to transport (heavy due to desired moisture content). So while it can be cheaply grown in the Midwest, it can't be cheaply transported from the Midwest to where buyers of alfalfa are (typically overseas).
Alfalfa is also a staple for crop rotation, so any farming operation will still grow some alfalfa to maintain rotation for good soil health (or during bad condition seasons since it's hardier to poor conditions and not a permanent crop).
If alfalfa cannot be exported (through policy or economic conditions), the low price attracts more livestock production in-state (which would be even worse for water use).
Those things makes it a hard crop to target for sustainability and export.
By kenhwang 7 hours ago
> it can't be cheaply transported from the Midwest to where buyers of alfalfa are
Trains.
Alfalfa isn't the only alternative, and they should switch to higher-value crops anyway. They would if they had to pay for water. We simply need to charge everybody for water usage.
By coryrc 3 hours ago
The problem is alfalfa is a high value crop and a water efficient crop relative to value.
So as water/weather gets more unpredictable and beef/dairy rises in price, alfalfa becomes even more attractive to grow.
By kenhwang 2 hours ago
to put this to numbers... the exports are just about 0.5% of california's GDP. so yeah pretty much a rounding error.
By weaksauce 9 hours ago
0.5% is a far cry from a rounding error..
By chrisrogers 7 hours ago
0.5% is like the literal definition of a rounding error.
By panzagl 7 hours ago
Pretty upsetting history along with the interesting engineering.
By phyzome an hour ago
My favorite part of this video is where they divert and dry up one lake, and then build two reservoirs further downstream.
By hnburnsy 5 hours ago
Am curious, how have the shade balls been working out in terms of maintenance, coating wear, leeched microplastics, containment (so they don't wind up in oceans), etc? In retrospect, did it make sense compared to the $250M or so uplift it would have taken to build a conventional roof?
By rkagerer 5 hours ago
No way they could feasibly have built a roof over that reservoir.
By lazide 5 hours ago
Just a quick plug for Cadillac Desert. People don't realize how fragile the urban areas of Coastal California are. We should.
There's a poem carved into the stonework of Washington Union Station, part of the art installation The Progress of Railroading from c. 1909:
the old mechanic arts / controlling new forces / build new highways / for goods and men / override the ocean / and make the very ether / carry human thought
the desert shall rejoice / and blossom as the rose
By retrac 7 hours ago
> the desert shall rejoice / and blossom as the rose
Or, rewritten for the Los Angeles Aqueduct:
the desert shall wither / and blossom in a plume of dust [1]
I was surprised to find out it was largely uncovered, though I guess it probably makes it much cheaper to construct. I usually think of aqueducts as pipes or tunnels, like Persian qanāts. I wonder how much water is lost due to evaporation.
By rimunroe 10 hours ago
There's some testing to see how covering open irrigation canals with solar panels which would reduce evaporation and generate power
> Their analysis found that putting solar panels over the 4,000 miles of California’s open canals could save up to 63 billion gallons of water annually
> could save up to 63 billion gallons of water annually
To put it into perspective, 63 billion gallons is 193340 acre-feet, which is 0.5% of california's water use (a bit under 40 millions acre-feet). That's a tenth the water consumption of lawns, which is 1/15th the water consumption of agriculture.
By masklinn 7 hours ago
Or about 4 hours of Mississippi River discharge.
By Rapzid 4 hours ago
But how many football fields?
By markdown 4 hours ago
Thanks! I forgot that article, but now I remember that I read or skimmed it when it made the rounds last year. It's actually where I first learned that the aqueducts were uncovered!
By rimunroe 9 hours ago
Nice picture but I've never seen the water anywhere near blue like that.
By anjel 3 days ago
That's a youtube thumbnail. I believe it's been altered, which also explains the strange brown substance that looks out of place.
Most of the video content has the correct coloring, from my experience observing the aqueduct.
By Supermancho 3 days ago
I think it's edited to look like water he uses in his garage demos.
By w4der 10 hours ago
I wonder at what point the up-front costs of massive desalination would overcome the (often hidden and externalized) costs of projects like this.
By bombcar 11 hours ago
> the up-front costs of massive desalination
Desalination is dominated by operating costs.
By JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago
Correct it's massively energy intensive to filter the salt out the newest best ideas still use ~2 KWh/m3 of water and that's a lab system in perdue that batches the process instead of having it run continuously which is why current RO desalination systems require so much energy.
By rtkwe 10 hours ago
For a real world comparison, the Perth desalination plant claims ~4kWh/m3.
By masklinn 7 hours ago
A scaled down perspective is….
The most efficient commercial desalinator for boats is 32 Watts a gallon.
By detourdog 9 hours ago
Do you mean 32 Watt-hours / gallon?
By fhdkweig 9 hours ago
Hard to say. The spec sheet calls out 4 Amps for the 12 Volt system or 32 Watts for a single gallon.
By detourdog 8 hours ago
California pays other states to take its excess solar energy. Power for a project like this isn't the issue, actually building the system is the issue.
By smm11 9 hours ago
They wouldn't if you switched just Urban water use from natural sources to desalination. To do that you need to replace the ~5 million acre feet of water, ~6,167,400,000 m3, that goes into the Urban bucket which is all of the water used to keep people alive, clean, and all industrial uses of water. [0] That comes to ~ 12BkWh of energy needed to scale up batched reverse osmosis to take over just the life and job required water needs which is about 25% of the total solar power generated in all of 2025 via grid-scale solar farms. CA does export some during the day due to excess solar but is still a net importer of power.
Those are the numbers I was looking for - that means that (ignoring build-out costs) total desalination for CA would be on the order of 10% of the 3 gorges dam yearly output (max).
By bombcar 7 hours ago
> California pays other states to take its excess solar energy
Intermittently. Essential services like water (with expensive fixed costs) aren’t a good fit for absorbing variable supply.
> Power for a project like this isn't the issue
California has the country’s most expensive power [1] in part due to policymakers constantly assuming it’s free.
As long as we don't try to hide and externalize the cost of all the hyper-saline brine management that comes with desalination.
By kibwen 9 hours ago
We can store it in the remains of Owens Lake ;)
By bombcar 7 hours ago
I don’t think the brine pollutant issue has been meaningfully solved. You are also now pumping water inland uphill the whole way.
By kjkjadksj 11 hours ago
For usage where the water mostly returns as sewage, is treated and then returned to the ocean, you can just dilute the brine with the treated discharge and then it returns at basically the original salinity.
By SoftTalker 10 hours ago
It is common now for treated discharge to be sent to a discharge lake/leach wetlands so it can be used to replenish groundwater supplies.
By kenhwang 9 hours ago
Growing up in LA, I was fascinated as a kid watching the water flow down this aqueduct. Anytime we drove by it on the way to Magic Mountain, I'd hope that it would be a water-on day.
By mjamesaustin 9 hours ago
My dad lived in Palmdale, my mom lived in Glendale. I made that trip a LOT. It's cool when it is all lit up with the colorful lighting.
By whalesalad 9 hours ago
For anyone interested in a deep dive, I recommend the book Vision or villainy: origins of the Owens Valley-Los Angeles water controversy.
By TipsForCanoes 8 hours ago
I remember hearing years ago that this aqueduct was going to be shut down and then it just... never was? Does anyone else recall that?
By wolandomny 9 hours ago
Some say the LA aqueduct saved Owens Valley from development. (I’m sure the old timers out there would have a different opinion)
By TheGrassyKnoll 8 hours ago
> (I'm sure the old timers ...
Something along the lines of "we fought tooth and nail to save LA from development"?
Came here to post this. Dam good book on the shifty maneuvering that resulted in the Owens Valley Diversion and ultimately the population center that is LA.
By jackconsidine 9 hours ago
That bit of history can't be left out. The engineering is super cool though.
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