Most of the video content has the correct coloring, from my experience observing the aqueduct.
Desalination is dominated by operating costs.
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.
[1] https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
[0] p2 of https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/...
For a rough estimate for replacing agricultural uses too ~6x that urban figure at least then weep at the amount of pumps you'd need to bring that water up and inland to the farm lands from the coast. At least for replacing urban use most of the population lives on/near the coast where the water would be produced.
But all of this is firmly in the "we could do it if we really wanted/needed to" not "needs more energy than the sun will produce in its lifetime".
The most efficient commercial desalinator for boats is 32 Watts a gallon.
Am I alone in thinking that doesn't sound like a lot? That would be something on the order of 10% of what major cities charge for tap water?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071315/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8...
(Chinatown)
Land of Little Rain by Mary Hunter Austin
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91707.The_Land_of_Little...
Another nitpick is that California's various aqueducts are net producers of electricity (i.e., after accounting for pumping), so, while some of them do rely on electricity, they do not require an external source of power to operate.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/nyregion/nyc-tap-water-qu...
This causes some issues for observant Jews, because the water technically might not be kosher.
https://oukosher.org/blog/consumer-news/nyc-water/
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/nyregion/the-waters-fine-...
Filtration isn't common.
EDIT: I'm a dork an grabbed the wrong URL. Changed URL to a PDF for lack of better.
A major metro doesn’t treat its tap water? Where on earth did you get that crazy idea?
<old URL deleted>
https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/water/drinking-...
I'll save some digging: "Even without filtration, the water is carefully treated to reduce the risk of harmful microorganisms."
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.
https://newsfeed.time.com/2010/08/31/drink-up-nyc-meet-the-t...
Tap water is treated (UV and chloride disinfecting), but is largely not filtered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_water_supply_sys...
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.
Larger buildings tend to have multiple independent systems
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.
> 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
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/solar-panel-cove...
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.
Not far away are the world's most photogenic boulders, the Buttermilks, and when I visited (from Canada) I was surprised to find that the boulders are on LA municipal property and the pipe that takes Owen's River's water over the Sierras is nearby.
I'd be happy about the light rail expansion if they weren't talking about delaying the Ballard line indefinitely. :(
(more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457884)
My point is that closing two lanes of the interstate for over a year is a failure of maintenance, rather than anything about light rail vs. driving.
It is an insane engineering achievement. A train literally running on tracks on a road that is floating on water!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course those were first built in the 19th century.
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.
But, hey, you'll be able to go really fast between California's 6th and 80th largest cities!
So slow, in fact, many countries have faster regular rail.
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
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.
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.
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.
So as water/weather gets more unpredictable and beef/dairy rises in price, alfalfa becomes even more attractive to grow.
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.
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.
Additionally, if you're focused on the 6% (out of 11% total) water allocation that goes towards supporting the infrastructure of 22million people over the 50% that goes into non-optimal agriculture (almonds, for instance) in-between the two...then you're missing the forest for the trees, my friend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Aqueduct
Would be interesting to see the relative amounts of use by LA and by agriculture in the Central Valley though.
https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
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.
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.
The California Aqueduct is used for farmland in the central valley.
Two different things.
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.
We created the miracle on the desert, and billions were made in real estate.
What natural lakes in the region are still "very large"?
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.
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.
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...
Something along the lines of "we fought tooth and nail to save LA from development"?
https://images.nebula.tv/5ba7e541-f57c-44cc-a91d-6a89bad158d...
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
Or, rewritten for the Los Angeles Aqueduct:
the desert shall wither / and blossom in a plume of dust [1]
[1] https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-06-19/owens-v...
I see some here:
https://lynceans.org/all-posts/status-of-desalination-plants...
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.
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.
How would a state-level solution to who deserves water more benefit from economies of scale? This is about as core of an example of where you don't want central planning as you can find.
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".
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.
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.”
This is all hypothetical of course but the logical eastern border of an independent state centered in what's now California would be near Denver for precisely this reason.
It’s cool. Still totally hard and makes everything fail early.
A big factor in determining desalination placement in the region are the groundwater basins. Limited size and availability makes the case for desalination as means for resiliency. Another is that situating adjacent to power plants so as to use their already coastally degraded intakes/outfalls. Doheny is to use subsurface slant wells for intakes, but it's also lower output too.
As for LA. they're working on getting their potable reuse plants/projects up and running. The largest indirect potable reuse plant in the world has been operating in OC for ~18 years. Lower operating costs than desalination, reduced wastewater discharge, and reduced coastal impact.
The few times I've been to the Salton area, I was amazed at the agriculture in the middle of the desert, including things like citrus plants, despite smelling the stench of salton from there. There are various lakes that dry up all the time like big bear, what would it take to keep such basins capable of sustaining fresh watter topped up with desalinated fresh water, instead of directly consuming it? In other words, making desalination an upstream element, with the goal of resisting drought overall, not just immediate fresh water supply.
I've ever wondered about places like death valley, if the elevation there is so low, is it easier to build geothermal plants that could desalinate at a greater rate there?
And since I'm asking dumb questions already, if an aqueduct to LA is possible at a 4 hour driving distance, then I know it would be costly, but is it that impractical to build an aqueduct from the great lakes, which have no shortage of fresh water, and evaporation loss could easily be recouped by the sheer volume of available fresh water supply.
Pumping is very energy intensive. At around 2000-3000 ft the energy needed to pump fresh water starts to equal the energy needed to desalinate the same amount of salt water.
Even if it’s just going up then back down again like the Tehachapi Mountains only like 1/3rd of the energy can be reclaimed.
It would pay for itself after a few flooding events where were are able to redistribute the water more quickly. It also provides clean energy storage.
I've posted about it before with links to the studies but it usually just starts an argument by people worried the rest of the country is going to steal their water...
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/963122
Why do you think it's good to let the productive agricultural land of CA lay fallow? Why do you want areas in the east to go without proper flood control? Why do you think national food security is not a priority? I could go on... Read up on it if you like, or don't. Whatever.
We were both correct.
Great articles have been written on the engineering but I like this one from 1909 showing the perspective of the time:
This is also why every video needs a transcript: that took me 6min to read, about 1/4 of the video's running time.
PS: and it is NOT about software engineering LOL!
