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Wow, what a fantastic post! The author, who holds a PhD from Caltech, proposes taking advantage of the decreasing cost of solar power to enable a new age of clean water abundance in California, sustainably, with the potential for massive revenues and profits at all steps in the value chain. Even if the author's calculations are off by a factor of two, the proposal looks like it could work. At a minimum, it merits serious consideration. The status quo will not solve our pressing environmental problems. The main challenge an innovative large-scale project like this one would face, I think, is a regulatory bureaucracy which to me often seems like it was designed for the technologies and infrastructure of the 20th century, not for those of the 21st century. I shudder to think of, say, inspectors who are highly trained on narrow technical matters, but who lack a fundamental, multi-disciplinary, big-picture view of the entire project, deciding whether to approve individual tiny little parts of it. |