HUNTINGTON BEACH—Southern California was hit with enough rain in 2019 for many experts and observers to declare an end to the region’s most recent drought – which could be bad news for Poseidon Water’s plans to build a desalination plant near land’s edge in Huntington Beach. It is hard to...
4 Responses
We may not be in a drought now but anyone who has lived in this state for 65 years as I have know another drought is predictable. Don’t be short sighted.
Tour Carisbad
Yes, drought inevitable. Yes, Poseidon is attempting to take advantage of the discounted power from AES as we were duped into exempting them from natural gas taxes during the Enron debacle. Every other entity in HB pays the tax … imagine how much revenue the city loses now … and how much it will sacrifice as power for this energy intensive process is fed to Poseidon without benefit (in water or tax revenue) to the municipality most impacted by infrastructure.
That incredible scenario is exemplary of the private-public partnerships where public always seems to be outmanuevered by appropriately profit seeking capitalists. No desire here to staunch capitalists – just concern that taxpayers always get the bill. That’s not hard earned profit … It’s arbitrage – leveraging taxpayers for risk free returns.
Ok, set those dynamics aside. Given the risk free nature of the project (Poseidon can, after all, simply go bankrupt if we refuse to rescue it from purchasing agreements that do not yield profitability) and the demands of a growing population that guarantees our water districts will maintain the output (reclamation could do the same thing but that’s a whole ‘nother issue) why would the additional expense and far lesser environmental impacts of a subsurface system like that proposed for south county desalination project be a non-starter for Poseidon? See points above and sense a much shorter-term perspective on this public-private “partnership” from the private side … I’m just an avid news reader with a memory. It was only 10 years ago that Moorlach and others put the kibosh on the contrived sale of toll roads on public lands from private investors to a non-profit entity … presumably because profits were not coming fast enough for the private investors. Will Moorlach and his kind be around to shut down similar maneuvers in the future? It will likely be necessary. A technologically feasible sub-sand surface water sourcing system will at least protect local HB beaches while the finance battles rage on.
Oh, yeah, what to do with the output from desalination? Reclamation has that solved with current waste stream output. Reclamation is – by demand and billing – scalable, in place, environmentally proven and completely publicly owned, operated and financed with zero risk that taxpayers will get duped by impatient but God-bless-America-we-definitively-need-’em profit oriented capitalists.
Let’s just recognize they need to play in separate sandboxes … or beaches!
Poseidon is yesterday’s tech & not terribly effective. Carlsbad still doesn’t produce 50mgd & quality issue persist. Originally Poseidon gave a cost of $1,100 per acre foot and finally signed at $2,400. Most recent cost was $2,700. There is lots of hot tech underway to build generation 2 desalination. Scrap Brookfield’s Posedion in HB now and take new bidders if the area needs it in 3 years. OCWD’s GRWS meets local needs for 7-10 years.