Water, Water Everywhere And Not A Drop For Export

There’s a long, but very interesting piece at POLITICO about Las Vegas, and how it’s attempting to become the Silicon Valley of water technology. The effort is unsurprising, given that Vegas gets a mere four inches of rain a year and the city’s explosive growth over the past 25 years or so has coincided with a rather severe period of drought out west .

As a result, the water levels at Lake Mead, the reservoir created in the Colorado River’s basin just above the Hoover Dam, have dropped precipitously over the past several years and the city fathers in Las Vegas have responded by imposing all kinds of water restrictions on the residents and commercial entities there. New houses in Las Vegas aren’t allowed to have grass lawns, the city pays people in old houses with grass lawns to rip up their turf and the city’s casinos spend millions of dollars to conserve and recycle water.

In other words, Las Vegas is a good place to pioneer technologies that conserve and recycle water. And given the economic catastrophe the Great Recession was to the gaming and tourism industry in Vegas, you can’t blame the folks there for spending some resources creating a clearinghouse to vet and incubate startup companies applying 21st century technology toward water use.

The water industry is by nature risk averse, since a mistake can have catastrophic health consequences (see Michigan; Flint). But with more pressure on water supplies around the United States and the world, innovation is increasingly important. Las Vegas’ focus on water—and the constant pressure on its supply—has driven years worth of public experimentation, establishing the area’s umbrella water utility, the Southern Nevada Water Authority, as a nationally recognized leader in water quality treatment. The utility boasts a state-of-the-art laboratory that produces ground-breaking research and a roster of scientists who routinely publish in major academic journals.

About 18 months ago, the region took an even bolder step forward. In a move driven in part by Nevada’s near-collapse during the Great Recession, the state, the city, the University of Nevada’s Desert Research Institute, the regional water authority and private industry teamed up to turn that reputation for water innovation into a catalyst for job creation.

They created WaterStart, a tiny incubator that finds and tests promising water technologies and helps hasten them to market. Technologies, for example, to remove nitrates from well water; that use drones to measure plant stress from the air to improve irrigation precision; or, as with those nondescript listening devices stashed along the Strip, to detect leaks before they can cause millions of dollars in lost tourism revenue.

There’s a certain element of government-boondoggle in Nevada’s WaterStart program, but on the other hand there is some sense to it as well – the water authorities there are using the incubator as something of a gatekeeper against the oodles of entrepreneurs pitching snake-oil panaceas to their water shortage problems. If somebody wants to get the Southern Nevada Water Authority or the water board in Las Vegas to buy into some idea they’ve got, they first have to prove it works through the WaterStart people.

Reading the article, though, one thing seems striking – it’s amazing how it’s necessary to have all of the innovative water technologies in Las Vegas, because there’s no water there, when the simpler solution would seem to be to  get them more water .

And with all of the constant blabbering about public infrastructure projects we hear, one wonders why there never seems to be any about the most obvious one – namely, to build a system of pipelines and reservoirs to transfer water from the Mississippi Valley, where there is never a shortage, to the Mountain West and Pacific coast, where there always seems to be.

Would it be expensive to do that? Of course it would. California is trying to build a train from Los Angeles to San Francisco and it’s already estimated to cost upwards of $68 billion. This is a lot less intricate a project than that despite its scope – it’s a pipeline connecting a bunch of holes in the ground going west to hook up with the Colorado River. Much of the infrastructure it would rely on is already in place thanks to Mother Nature.

Source: The Hayride

Read More Related Content On This Topic - Click Here

Media

Taxonomy

• Drought
• River Basin management
• Water Management