San Diego Going from Sea to Shining Sink

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San Diego Going from Sea to Shining Sink

Israeli Company IDE Technologies Builds Desalination Plantto Produce 50 million Gallons of Water Per Day in San Diego

In the early 1990s, San Diego was experiencing drought conditions similar to those it faces today. At that time, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD), a water distribution center in Los Angeles, was essentially San Diego County's only source of water.

In 1991, MWD cut San Diego's supply by 31 percent. With that, the San Diego business community started looking for other sources of water for the 3 million people and hundreds of acres of farmland in the region.

That's where Israel enters the picture.

Starting in November 2015, adesalination plantin Carlsbad, Calif., built and operated by the Israeli companyIDE Technologies, will produce 50 million gallons of water per day.

The plant will provide 7-10 percent of the San Diego region's needs.

Today, 90 percent of San Diego's water is still piped in from northern California, sourced by the Colorado River and sold through MWD. Local reservoirs provide 5-10 percent of the water San Diego uses, depending on the amount of rainfall in a given year.

There are also a handful of reclamation plants that treat wastewater for use in irrigating agriculture, parks, and golf courses.

"Ultimately," says Robert Yamada, water resources manager for the San Diego County Water Authority, "the primary reason [for developing the Carlsbad desalination plant] is that we see desalination as a highly reliable part of the overall water supply portfolio. We've been planning on adding desalination, noted in our planning documents, since the early 2000s."

The Carlsbad project has been in development in some form or another since 1998. Understanding that the water situation in San Diego County was unsustainable, the privately held seawater desalination company Poseidon Water, headquartered in Boston, conducted a feasibility study for the plant in 2000.

They looked at options for both a plant that would meet only the needs of the city of Carlsbad, and one that would serve the entire region. Two years of discussions followed and, by 2002, agreements were made with Carlsbad and the county's Water Authority to move forward with permitting activities, designs, and construction contracts for a large regional plant.

Source: JNS

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