by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
The Wall Street Journal headline said “San Diego Now Has So Much Water That It’s Selling It.” The article said San Diego generates enough water to rescue Arizona, though that’s jumping the gun just a bit. No such deal has actually been finalized yet, but the fact that the conversation is underway marks a new era in Colorado River negotiations. And not a minute too soon.
The latest optimism is not based on any change in the historically low flow of the Colorado River. It’s based on the realization — at long last — that California does not need Colorado River water. That realization has finally come not only to Colorado (which has been making this point for decades) but to all of the seven states in the Colorado River Basin, which are entitled to various amounts of river water allocated by a century-old interstate compact and several other legal agreements.
California occupies 840 miles of coastline on the world’s largest body of water, the Pacific Ocean. The issue of desalination has risen to the top of the agenda for other Basin States now for two reasons. First, the inability of the states to reach an agreement on drastic reductions in their water use requires them to focus on other alternatives. Second, the oceanside Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad desalination plant in San Diego County has completed a series of upgrades that may be game-changing.
Compared to other desalination plants around the world, the Carlsbad facility is relatively small. But for California, it represents a giant leap. The plant was constructed in 2015 to convert seawater from the nearby Encina Powerplant. After Encina shut down in 2018, the desalination plant had to make significant upgrades to replace that water with ocean water, upgrades just recently completed.
