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California's chronic water worries have been aggravated by rapidly accumulating signals that the climate is changing, with warmer winters, smaller snow pack in the Sierra, earlier snowmelt, and more extreme weather events. Coastal cities expecting water shortages are searching for ways to build "portfolios" that ensure a stable, reliable, and locally sustainable water supply. Water districts and state agencies are promoting conservation measures as part of the mix, but the more intense push right now is for desalination.

More than 20 proposals for producing drinking water from seawater are in various stages of active consideration along the southern and central coast and on San Francisco Bay. They are driven by dire expectations, supported by public subsidies, and encouraged by the federal and state administrations and private water purveyors. Private corporations or public/private partnerships are proposing five of the projects, including two that would be the largest on this continent, in Carlsbad, San Diego County, and in Huntington Beach, Orange County.

Desalination is the most expensive way to get potable water in California. Technological refinements have lowered its cost, but energy accounts for a third to half of the cost of production, and energy prices are moving only in one direction. Peter Gleick, cofounder and president of the independent, nonpartisan Pacific Institute, which in 2006 published an analysis of benefits and costs, Desalination with a Grain of Salt: A California Perspective, says subsidies hide the true costs.

California voters gave desalination a boost in 2002 with Proposition 50, the water bond act, which provided $50 million in grants to help water districts develop and build desalination plants. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which covers six counties, has offered 25-year subsidies of $250 an acre-foot for water produced by desalination. (An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, or one acre one foot deep, and provides for the annual needs of four average families). At the federal level, three bills to fund development or production of desalted water, available to both public and private water services providers, were introduced in the last Congress. The U.S. Desalination Coalition, founded in 2003 by five large southern California water agencies, is working to "encourage federal support and funding." Its members now include water agencies in Florida, Texas, and Hawaii.

Who Benefits?
Everyone involved in discussions about desalination--from voters to public officials to environmental organizations and water companies--seems to accept that it will play some role in California's future. At conferences, workshops, and hearings they are debating, however, whether that future has arrived.

When and where will desalted water be needed? Who gets the water? Who should build and operate plants, at what cost and for whose benefit? How big should they be? Would they encourage excessive development? What effect would the discharge of left-over brine, with its chemical residues, have on marine ecosystems? What type of seawater intake will be permissible and how will it impact the coast? If private companies are involved, will water, a vital resource in the public trust, be turned into a commodity?

If all the plants now proposed are built, they could supply an estimated seven per cent of the state's urban water use. Their effects on the coast, however, could be major. A report by the Coastal Commission, Seawater Desalination and the California Coastal Act (2004), states: "The concerns about desalination are due primarily to its potential to cause adverse effects and growth that are beyond the capacity of California's coastal resources." In some coastal areas, the single largest constraint to growth has been a limited water supply.

Proponents of desalination plants maintain they are needed for a growing population, as hedges against drought and other disasters, to reduce dependence on a limited imported water supply, and as a reliable new local water source. They tout the end product as pure water that is of better quality than what now flows out of faucets in many locales.

Go-slow advocates point out that forecasts of water requirements have proved to be greatly overblown, that immense amounts of water are now wasted, that water use has been reduced greatly, and can be reduced much more, by measures that improve efficiency, encourage conservation, and provide for reuse. Such measures can yield more water at far less cost than desalination, they say, while reducing water pollution and saving energy and money. Building desalination plants now could undermine further progress.

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