A note about desalination
Spend our taxes and water rate increases on jobs, not electricity
There seems to be a misconception that building and operating a desal plant would create more jobs than implementing water conservation strategies. Yes, the designing, permitting, constructing, and maintaing a desalination plant would create some jobs; however, the majority of the jobs will go to large multinational engineering firms that have experience in the field. These firms have little interest in supporting the Santa Cruz community and the millions we spend to build the plant will be extracted from our city ($300,000 is already going to a SF firm for soliciting plant designs). Furthermore, it is well documented that energy use accounts for half the cost of desalinating water, so after the plant is built the exorbitant costs would just begin (keep in mind that California energy prices have increase 6.7% per year since 1970).
Photo from Santa Cruz Sentinel
An alternative strategy would be to implement an aggressive City sponsored water conservation strategy that spent half the forecasted desal money on subsidizing water conservation retrofits, such as rainwater catchment, grey water systems, and water smart gardens, for local homes and buildings.
A simple poll of Santa Cruzans would show that they would love to have a rainwater catchment and grey water system that zeroed out their landscape irrigation water usage, but feel it is too expensive to implement. The solution is to subsidize water conservation as aggressively as the proposed Desal Plant subsidy.
Santa Cruz has hundreds of local contractors and landscapers that already have the skills, tools, and manpower to implement water conservation retrofits. Jobs would be created in manufacturing materials and equipment, design and installation, and lifetime operation and maintenance. Rather than pay an out of town engineering firm $30,000,000+ to build a desal plant then go away, why not spend $15,000,000 on local contractors?
There are tens of thousands of homes and buildings that need retrofits, and the resulting cumulative water conservation effect will likely exceed desal water production (40% of typical household water use is for landscaping; a 75% reduction in landscape water though conservation retrofits = 30% reduction in overall water use).
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 8th, 2010 at 6:28 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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