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.”

So screams an online appeal by the Surfrider Foundation to its “powerful activist network,” which apparently is OK with the ocean being used for recreation but not for purposes of providing water usable by Orange County’s more than 3 million residents.

At its Nov. 13 meeting in Newport Beach, the state Coastal Commission will consider a challenge to plans by Poseidon Water to build a seawater desalination plant six miles up the road in Huntington Beach that will produce 50 million gallons of freshwater a day, enough to cover roughly 8 percent of the county’s needs.

Executives for Poseidon, a private company headquartered in Boston, with a  West Coast office in Carlsbad, say the Huntington Beach desal facility will be the largest,  most technologically advanced and most energy efficient not only in California, and not only in the United States, but in the entire Western Hemisphere.

The project has an estimated price tag of $899 million and the taxpayers of neither Huntington Beach, nor Orange County, nor the state of California will foot the bill. Instead, Poseidon will go to the bond market to finance the build.

It is because of the promise of increasing the supply of water to residents of the nation’s sixth-largest county, and because much of the cost will be borne by Poseidon, that the county’s 11 representatives in the state Legislature, Democrats and Republicans, recently sent a letter to the Coastal Commission backing the proposed desal plant.

What Surfrider’s fear-mongering ignores

But none of that matters to Surfrider, which thinks it knows better than Orange County’s 11 elected representatives in Sacramento how the commission should vote on the Huntington Beach desal project.

Indeed, Surfrider claims that Poseidon’s plant design for Huntington Beach “would set the lowest possible standards for protecting our coast and ocean.” The group frets that the proposed plant might “unnecessarily kill marine life.”

It warns that discharge of highly concentrated brine into the ocean “degrades water quality and marine life habitat if not properly diluted.” And it cautions that ocean desal is “the most energy-intensive and expensive water supply option in California.”

What may not be known to many, if not most, of those attending the Coastal Commission’s Nov. 13 meeting — that is, those who are not members of Surfriders’ “powerful activist network” — is that the plant design for Poseidon’s Huntington Beach desal plant that supposedly would set the “lowest possible standards” is almost identical to the design the commission previously approved for Poseidon’s Carlsbad desal plant.

As to the threat the Huntington Beach plant poses to marine life and habitat, Scripps Institution of Oceanography coastal engineer Scott Jenkins and marine biologist Jeffrey Graham concluded that “the science has demonstrated the effects of the desalination facility on the marine environment are benign.”

The amount of energy to produce enough desal water to meet a family’s need for a year is no more the energy need to run a refrigerator for a year. And the Orange County Water District estimates that desal water would increase residential water bills 7 percent in 2017, which works out to $3.50 on a $50 water bill.

Orange County’s state legislative delegation unanimously agreed, “The Huntington Beach Desalination Project is a critically needed and environmentally responsible solution to the county’s supply needs.”

It remains to be seen whether the unelected state Coastal Commission overrides the will of the county’s duly elected state representatives.