[vkou]

Agriculture brings may bring in only 5% of the state's economy, but if every single piece of food eaten in California had to be imported, it would cost a lot more then 5% of its economy.

If food were grown by magic, without employing any people, and it could all be sold at cost, it would contribute 0% to the state's economy. Does that mean that it would make economic sense to immediately stop growing all that food? Of course not! The fact that growing food is so cheap is a good thing!

[terravion]

To amplify your point, excepting water, the San Joaquin Valley in particular has the best climate and input factors in the possibly the world for producing high value crops at low cost and low environmental impact. If we could supply another 50-100M acre feet of water to the aqueduct system amazing thinks could happen.

My quick calculation is the biggest of these desal plants would only feed 25,000 acres of almonds. There are 1M acres +/- of almonds in California, if we wanted to double nut protein production in California (the leading global exporter of almonds) you would need about 50 of the plants described not just three.

Who wants to build the giga-desal plant to feed the Clifton Court Forebay?