San Diego board approves desalination plant on coast

A plan by a private company to build a $320-million desalination plant along the coast of northern San Diego County was approved unanimously today by the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board.

Proponents say the plan could provide more than 56,000 acre-feet of drinkable water by 2012, enough to satisfy the needs of more than 100,000 families. Connecticut-based Poseidon Resources has been planning the project for a decade and navigating the complex permit process for five years.

But environmentalist activists, who believe the project would harm the coastal environment, plan to appeal to the State Water Quality Control Board and to continue at least three lawsuits aimed at blocking the project.

Under the plan, the plant would be built adjacent to the Encina power plant in Carlsbad.

The plant would turn salt water into fresh water by a reverse osmosis process. Poseidon has yet to announce its full financing plan for what is proposed to be the nation's largest such project.

San Diego County is largely devoid of groundwater, making it dependent on imported water from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and, in recent years, on a complex water transfer agreement with the Imperial Irrigation District. Several suburban water districts have shown interest in buying some of the water from Poseidon.

—Tony Perry

Comments

[James Andrews]

How can they do this. Why would the Coastal Commission allow this. You cannot just take water out of the ocean. There must be an environmental study done. Has anyone asked Al Gore. This might night be an approved method. This will just allow more people to over populate the Southern California area. This extra water is not natural and will allow other forms of pollution. Jerry Brown needs to study the warming effect it may have through unintended consequence. This must be stopped. I am sure something is wrong with it.

[Joe]

This is the problem with so many environmentalists. Some groups will get mad if you take more water from others sources like the Colorado or mts. So a company comes by with a pragmatic solution to tap into one of our greatest unused resources: salt water, and then other groups get mad for upsetting the beach's ecosystem. This why so many people hate environmentalists, because you can never please them, their different groups are so oppositional. They delay progress within their movements and society as a whole.

[Bob NH]

Desalting sea water is more expensive and consumes more energy than any other means of achieving the same effect through conservation or processing less saline (brackish) waters, including reclaiming waste waters. The 10-year-old proposal has been made obsolete by concerns for global warming and cost of energy.

The real reason for building this project is that it will be a money-mill for the developers who will sell the water to water utilities and rate-payers at double or triple the cost of current supplies.

[john amen]

It's not fair for Joe and Bob to gang up on the decision of the water control board to solve our water shortage.These two either don't care or just plain stupid to the fact that our water supply is drying up and that the decision to go ahead with desaliinization plants for San Diego County is a feather in their cap and a acknowledgement that the Control Board both undersatnd the water shortage and are are willing to do something significant about it.