How The Low Price Of Water Causes Water Scarcity Comments

ron daniel

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 14:58:47 +0000

Desalination is presently 4X the cost of freshwater. The Desalination industry (R.O) accomplished close to the minimum possible specific energy consumption decades ago. There is nowhere to go beyond minimum SEC The only prospect of reducing desalination costs is in transforming the aspects of the overall process either side of desalination It is the overall process that makes 'Desalination' 4X the cost of freshwater. TELESIS reduces desalination production costs by ≥ 50% www.telesis-synergy.com

DAVID CROW

Tue, 5 Feb 2019 15:04:26 +0000

I can see the solutions now, ignore the basic economics of supply and demand that influence price and have governments intervene on the basis of fairness. Then, with the cost of water being higher, some people won't be able to pay for it. The government steps in again to tell the ones already paying an artificially high price for water that they must give even more for those that the government priced out the ability to afford. Meanwhile, the government is doing what it does best, takes the money from producers and decides who it should go to with the intervening steps of politicians and their buddies getting their cut along the way.

Dan

Tue, 5 Feb 2019 11:46:46 +0000

A related issue is that companies like Nestle use lobbyists to push through legislation that allows them to buy water rights at a significantly reduced cost. This depletes the supply of fresh water at an increased rate, increasing the cost for the average consumer because corporations pay pennies on the dollar and it adds an almost incalculable amount of plastic waste to our environment which then makes the remaining resources more costly to acquire. https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/na... https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lawsuit-nest...

Tunde

Thu, 31 Jan 2019 09:58:19 +0000

Completely agree with you thanks for in-depth analysis

Jon LIberzon

Wed, 30 Jan 2019 21:33:38 +0000

I certainly agree that water is generally undervalued in the US. This is not an intractable situation. The amount of money that citizens pay for clean water in the developing world is much higher than in the developed world, and of course the same is true of poorer populations in the US (as in the case of Flint & Detroit). If we instituted progressive or tiered pricing on water as we do in our tax structure, we could maintain quality service to lower-income residents while increasing total revenues. While it is true that ratepayers in the west are used to cheap, almost limitless clean water, demand plasticity (seen in California during the last drought) can easily be combined with a backing-off of historic subsidies to value water properly. My main issue is with the second premise of this article, which is that only price limits our ability to desalinate seawater to completely serve the needs of coastal cities. First and foremost, the issue is not money, but rather what that money represents: energy & waste. Desalination is a huge energy hog, and pushing most of the world's major population centers towards an energy-intensive water source is not going in the right direction with respect to climate change, unless we assume that all these huge desal plants will also be powered by offshore wind farms (coastal land is too expensive and limited to run all these plants on solar). Secondly, waste brine from desal plants can have a major negative impact on ocean ecosystems. This risk must be dealt with before we switch over to large-scale desal the world over. Finally, RO membranes are not currently recycled, and these would represent an enormous waste stream coming off of such huge desal plants. More work is necessary to establish a circular economy for RO membranes in order to make global-scale desal sustainable. As Malcolm wisely mentioned, all of these worries are reduced if the RO plants use recycled wastewater instead of seawater as an input; but in that case the focus on coastal cities is moot. In order to reduce demand for water in general, we can move all cities, both coastal and inland, down the road of potable reuse. That way, new sources equal to roughly 75% of the current water supply can be provided without taking a drop of water out of the sea.