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by skybrian
758 days ago
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This article is quite long-winded, but to summarize, they are proposing a desalination scheme assuming cheap solar energy. Given that California electricity is pretty expensive even though we have lots of solar energy, how can that be done? Why not sell it to the grid? It might help to know that the author of the article is the founder of Terraform Industries, which aims to use solar power to synthesize natural gas. Likely the hope is to get efficiency by closely integrating the solar panels with the desalination plant, similar to how they do it in that project. I think if they really can get cheap desalination, there are many cities that would buy the water and pay more than agriculture. It wouldn't make sense to tackle agricultural use first, since it's more price-sensitive. |
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Look at wholesale prices of electricity on the grid, and it's really small.
High prices in California are due to PG&E not maintaining the grid and causing massive amounts of damages, which everybody else pays for. Or something. It's really hard to find out why our transmission and distribution prices are so high. And for that matter, generation costs on bills are super high despite people usually getting much cheaper generation prices if they have a Community Choice option that procures their own renewable generation.
In any case, if the desalination project was funded by their own off grid generation they'd have really cheap electricity.