[John Cleese, hollering “ALBATROSS!”, regards the Carlsbad plant.]
Vern intro: John Earl, formerly of Surf City Voice, now publishing SoCalWaterWars on Substack, moved a while back from OC to San Diego, but his latest article should be of interest to those of us who successfully fought off Poseidon’s desal boondoggle here.
Looking at what San Diego’s ratepayers are putting up with, OC can breathe a sigh of relief and say, “There but for the grace of the Coastal Commission (and two decades of grassroots activism) go we.” At least the failures we’d seen down in Carlsbad were helpful in our fight against the same company’s efforts in HB.
We’d be remiss, as you read the following, not to remind you of some of the politicians who fought hard to bring this disaster to OC as well: Democrats Tom Daly, Tom Umberg, Joe Kerr, Gavin Newsom, Barbara Boxer, the late Jordan Brandman, the building trades unions and Labor Fed (and of course nearly ALL Republicans.) Now I give you John Earl.
How can we get rid of the Carlsbad ocean desalination plant?
It has become a $1.3 billion financial albatross for the San Diego County Water Authority.
by John Earl, July 27, 2024
On July 25, the San Diego County Water Authority (CWA) Board of Directors voted for a 14% wholesale rate increase effective in 2025 for the wholesaler’s 23 local water agencies, to be followed by a 16.4% increase in 2026 plus 5.6% in 2027 (40.1 percent compounded).
The increase is part of an unstoppable trend in county water management caused by CWA’s high debts and declining water use, resulting in less revenue for paying those debts—over $2 billion worth.
The longer CWA delays paying its debts due to lack of revenues the more its credit rating declines, potentially adding tens of millions of dollars in debt in coming years.
A major cause of CWA’s financial troubles is its failure to recognize conservation and wastewater purification as the preferred water-reliability alternatives while zealously over projecting its supply needs in an era of severe climate change.
The least needed tool inside CWA’s water-reliability portfolio, many water buffalos now believe, is the $1.3 billion Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad [ocean] Desalination Plant, previously invented and owned by Poseidon Water.
Poseidon got the plant running, sort of, in 2015 and produces up to 48,000/AF of drinkable water a year (when fully operable) at a ridiculously high cost, soon to be $4,000/AF, almost four times the cost of imported water and over twice the cost of recycled wastewater.
To lower staff’s originally projected 18% rate increase, the board voted to cut $2 million from the operational budget and postpone aqueduct repairs—saving another $7 million—for now—by “kicking the can down the road,” as some board members love to derisively say.
In order to limit the rate increase, CWA will also divert a $19 million federal grant intended for a mandatory upgrade of the desal plant’s intake system to other budget areas. The grant will help pay the agency’s $77.5 million cost share for the $220 million project. Channelside will pay the rest of the difference.
That funds transfer would be a temporary benefit—another kicking the can down the road. Because at some point the $19 million will have to be pulled back to finish the upgrade without which the plant would close and CWA would be on the hook for $1.3 billion.
Which might be a good idea, because after 10 years of true love CWA’s binding 30-year take-or-pay marriage with Poseidon (now Channelside) has become a big albatross around its neck.
These days, talk of abandoning or rolling off the Carlsbad desalination plant is growing among water board directors in public and closed-door meetings.
“The problem is,” one local water director told me, “the Authority can’t face reality. They need to stop borrowing money.”
Poseidon was originally offered a desal technology that produces nearly 100% of the water as potable by removing the salt, which at current prices is worth more than the water. They and their engineering partner, IDE, turned it down because they didn’t want to deal with the salt.
They were recently offered an improved, less costly-to-build-and-operate, version of that technology as an add-on to their RO plant. They also turned it down for the same reason.
The alternate technology produces no concentrated brine as effluent that goes back into the ocean. Twice as much water for the same input and more than double the income. Seems like a no-brainer to me. A company in Oakland buys the salt and makes magnesium ingots from it. 142 gallons of seawater produces one pound of magnesium metal.
How did they remove the salt from seawater? With a salt magnet?