At an event held Monday at the oceanfront facility 30 miles north of San Diego, speakers praised the wisdom of the San Diego County Water Authority in teaming with project developer Poseidon Water in building the plant over the objections of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. They said the desal plant should inspire construction of similar facilities across drought-plagued California.

But Poseidon’s bid to build a $900 million desal plant in Huntington Beach shows that the drought hasn’t necessarily changed anything in terms of making the legal and regulatory obstacle course easier to navigate. As the OC Weekly points out, Poseidon has been trying to secure support and approval for the Orange County project for at least as long as it pursued the Carlsbad project, first proposing a design for a desal plant there in 1998.

How far have company officials gotten? An August story in the Orange County Register noted that there is not even established acceptance of the proposed location of the facility:

The push to look at other locations is reflective of a perception among anti-Poseidon activists that the company has foisted its project upon an unwitting public, that it’s proposing a plant no one asked for, and that the plant isn’t even needed in these times of conservation and water-use cutbacks. Recycling technologies are improving, they point out, and there’s talk of storing storm-water for later use as drinking water.

 

Poseidon has good reasons for locating its proposed plant near the AES power plant in Huntington Beach. There’s already an open ocean intake pipe at the location, a pipe used to bring in seawater to cool down the power plant.

Surfrider group: Orange County project ‘the worst offender’

While the California Coastal Commission ended up siding with Poseidon in approving the Carlsbad plant, it’s not clear if the commission is prepared to do the same with the Huntington Beach proposal. Environmentalists assert the desalination plant poses significant risks to offshore marine life in Orange County. The Surfrider Foundation’s Newport Beach chapter is leading the charge, calling the proposed project the most damaging yet proposed in California:

There are a number of desalination technologies, and if it is not done properly, the seawater intake process can unnecessarily kill marine life.  Desalination also produces a highly concentrated brine discharge that degrades water quality and marine life habitat if not properly diluted. …

 

There are numerous ocean desalination facilities being proposed in California, all in various stages of planning or permitting. Many of the proposed facilities have not been designed to minimize degradation to marine habitats and water quality, nor are the proposals being thoroughly evaluated by any government agency for their cumulative impacts statewide. The California State Water Resources Control Board is currently in the process of collecting scientific data on the adverse impacts of ocean desalination, and how best to minimize those impacts. But some proposals are moving forward without having adopted the recommendations of the science community – Poseidon’s project proposal is the worst offender.

Nevertheless, the project has bipartisan political support, and has begun to make the sort of process gains that Poseidon did with its Carlsbad proposal several years ago. The Los Angeles Times has details:

In May, the board of the Orange County Water District approved a non-binding term sheet with Poseidon to negotiate the price of water from the plant and to determine who would be responsible for various aspects of the project.

 

[Poseidon Vice President Scott] Maloni said he expects the Orange County district to negotiate a 50-year deal with Poseidon should the project be approved by the California Coastal Commission sometime in the spring.

 

A key part of the term sheet is that Poseidon must prove to the Orange County district that the Carlsbad plant can operate without a hitch for 90 consecutive days.

 

“We’re probably a year away from executing a final water purchase agreement [with the Orange County Water District],” Maloni said. “Carlsbad would be in operation for a good amount of time.”

But almost none of the coverage has reflected the fact that formal, official planning has been going on for years for one of the world’s largest desal plants along the coast of the Camp Pendleton Marine base in north San Diego County. Any construction is years off, but necessary preparatory work is well under way.

The image above of a proposed desal plant there comes from a 2010 presentation by the San Diego County Water Authority. It shows how sky-high water planners are on the potential of the 17-mile Camp Pendleton coast. Attention is now focused on a site in the southwest corner of the 125,000-acre base, just north of Oceanside and about 20 miles north of the Carlsbad desalination plant that is scheduled to open in coming months.

The Carlsbad plant will be the biggest in the Western Hemisphere and is expected to produce 50 million gallons of water a day — 7 percent of the San Diego region’s needed supply.

The Camp Pendleton project would be far bigger, with desalination experts saying 150 million gallons of water a day is realistic. That would make it one of the largest desal plants in the world.

A Saudi Arabian desalination plant will produce 264 million gallons a day when its first phase is complete, Bloomberg News reports.

A 2009 San Diego County Water Authority report didn’t take it for granted that the Pendleton project’s supplies are needed. It spoke of only expanding the project to the full 150 million gallons a day “as supply and demand conditions warranted.”

After four years of drought, there’s not much doubt that California needs far more reliable water sources — especially in the San Diego region, given that local water officials have spent 20-plus years fighting with the giant Metropolitan Water District over supply and costs.

The water mega-wholesaler has long opposed San Diego’s efforts to diversify its water supply by partnering with Poseidon, a private company, to build the Carlsbad plant and by striking a deal to shift Colorado River water from agricultural uses in Imperial County to supplies for homes and businesses in San Diego County.

On July 2, 2012, the California Supreme Court ruled that the state’s charter cities are not required to pay prevailing wages under state law for local public works projects that are funded by local funds.  In State Building and Construction Trades Council of California, AFL-CIO v. City of Vista, the court made clear that charter cities in California have the autonomy to decide individually whether to pay prevailing wages for local construction projects. This decision may tempt cities not organized as charter cities to change their legal status, as the city of Vista did in this case, in order to avoid the prevailing wage law.

That led the unions to induce the Legislature to pass a variant on this bill that banned charter cities from using state funds for public works projects unless they paid prevailing wages — and the tweaked version on Wednesday was upheld by a San Diego court. This is from the U-T San Diego:

An attempt by several cities to overturn a state law that forces them to choose between paying generally higher or “prevailing” wages on most public works projects or lose state construction dollars has been turned aside in a tentative court ruling.

San Diego County Superior Court Judge Joel Wohlfeil rejected arguments from the cities of Oceanside, Vista, Carlsbad and El Cajon [and El Centro and Fresno] that the requirement violates the state constitution. …

Wohlfeil wasn’t swayed in his tentative decision, ruling the law “appears to legitimately influence local governance by attaching conditions on the receipt of discretionary state funding.” He also said pursuing state policy objectives through financial incentives is generally constitutional.

But as I pointed out in a U-T San Diego editorial …

Wohlfeil cited the law’s purported objective — “the statewide concern of creating and maintaining a skilled construction work force” — but not the real one: helping unions.

The cities are expected to appeal if Wohlfeil doesn’t change his mind before issuing a final decision.

So much for spirit of CA Constitution

While I have blamed the unions and the Legislature in this post, it’s worth noting this never would have happened had Gov. Jerry Brown not signed the two bills into law.

It’s impossible to look at the intent of the charter city provision in the California Constitution and think these two bills bullying charter cities honor the spirit of the provision’s goal of local autonomy.

Who knows this? Yale Law School graduate Edmund G. Brown Jr.

By Joseph Perkins

The Western Hemisphere’s largest seawater desalination plant moved a huge step closer to actually being built with the tentative agreement Thursday by the San Diego County Water Authority to buy all the water produced by the Carlsbad plant’s private developer, Poseidon Resources.

This is a huge deal for Poseidon. If finalized by the water authority board, as expected, it will clear the way for the company to sell bonds to finance more than 80 percent of the $900 million project, which is slated to begin operations in 2016.

And the deal boosts Poseidon in another important way: It builds momentum for a desalination plant it has proposed for Orange County, the Huntington Beach Seawater Desalination Facility, about 60 miles up the freeway from Carlsbad.

“This is definitely an important milestone,” Poseidon spokesman Scott Maloni told the Associated Press, “one that we’ve been look forward to a long time.”

And it’s not just Poseidon, headquartered in Stamford, Conn., with regional offices in Carlsbad and Huntington Beach, that has waited a long time for California to tap into the Pacific Ocean, turning salt water into drinkable water.

Indeed, there are more than 21,000 desalination plants in operation throughout the world, producing more 3.5 billion gallons a day of potable water. The irony is that the reverse osmosis technology used in desalination was actually pioneered right here in California, by San Diego-based General Atomics.

Yet, there is only one desalination plant currently in operation here in the Golden State — the smallish Sand City Desalination Plant in Monterey County, which came online in 2010, and is currently producing about 300,000 gallons a day of drinkable water.

50 million gallons

Poseidon’s Carlsbad Desalination Project will produce 50 million gallons a day of drinking water, enough to supply 7 percent of the San Diego region by 2012. It will not be cheap, as critics note. It will cost the water authority $2,042 to $2,290 an acre-foot, more than twice what it pays to buy water from outside the region.

But the price tag for desalinated water has to be put in perspective. Potable water is an inelastic commodity, like electricity and gasoline. We can’t do without it. And we’ll pretty much pay whatever it costs to have it.

Indeed, California consumers are paying 50 percent more today for electricity than they were in 2000, according to the California Public Utilities Commission.

And we’d be paying even more were the PUC not artificially suppressing the prices Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric can charge their business and residential customers.

The run up in pump prices in recent years is even more pronounced. In January 2009, the average price of the gas here in the Golden State was $1.93. Today, it costs twice as much for California motorists to fuel up.

Given the scarcity of water here in the nation’s most populous state, it is prudent for water districts not only in the counties of San Diego and Orange, but throughout California, to seek ways to grow their supplies of water to meet future demand.

The Pacific Ocean represents an abundant source of water, and desalination the means of converting that salt water into water usable by California’s thirsty population.