First U.S. Desalination Plant Goes Online

DrEnter writes "According to this AP article on Yahoo!, the first full-time desalination plant has gone online in the U.S. to provide fresh water for the Tampa Bay, Florida area (from Tampa Bay itself). While common in the mideast and other parts of the world, this is the first in the U.S. to be used as a regular source of fresh water (there are a couple others in the U.S. that are only for emergency use). It will also (arguably) be one of the least expensive to operate, producing 1000 gallons selling for about $2. There is some more information at Tampa Bay Water's web site."

Comments

Cost analysis is important

[GuyMannDude]

I sure hope they've done to cost calculations correctly. The Santa Barbara desalination plant is an example of jumping before thinking. During the drought years of the late 80s and early 90s, Santa Barbara undertook the expensive proposition of building a desalination plant. A few months after it went online, rainfall boosted water reserves to a high enough level that drought conditions were no longer in effect. Because it's darn expensive to run and maintain a plant like this, Santa Barbara shut down its plant indefinitely. All that money spent and the city doesn't even use it. Click for more details.

Bottom line: make sure you really need something before you go building it. I hope the Tampa Bay people have done their math right.

GMD

Re:Cost analysis is important

[Anonymous Coward]

The $2/1,000 figure is definitely pie-in-the-sky. It will be lucky to be twice that. One of the wild cards is energy cost. This plant (when fully built out) will use a tremendous amount of energy. Trading one impact on the environment (pumping hundreds of millions of gallons of groundwater per year) for another (an increase of hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil per year equivalent in electricity). The real amazing fact is that over half of the water produced by this utility (Tampa Bay Water) is used for watering lawns.