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California Fights Drought With 96 Million "Shade Balls"
HughPickens.com writes: Katie Rogers writes in the NY Times that the city of Los Angeles is releasing 96 million plastic "shade balls" into the 175-acre Los Angeles Reservoir to help block sunlight and UV rays that promote algae growth, which would help keep the city's drinking water safe. Officials also say the balls will help slow the rate of evaporation, which drains the water supply of about 300 million gallons a year. The balls cost $0.36 each and are part of a $34.5 million initiative to protect the water supply. Shade balls are the brainchild of Brian White, a biologist with the utility who based the idea on "bird balls" that he observed in waterways near airport runways to prevent airfield bird strikes. The Los Angeles Reservoir, which holds 3.3 billion gallons, or enough water to supply the city for up to three weeks, joins three other reservoirs already covered in the shade balls. "In the midst of California's historic drought, it takes bold ingenuity to maximize my goals for water conservation," says Mayor Eric Garcetti who was at the Los Angeles Reservoir to mark the addition of 20,000 of the small balls to the lake. "This effort by LADWP is emblematic of the kind of the creative thinking we need to meet those challenges."
To the extent the point was to keep heat away from the water, I wonder why they didn't go for something with a high albedo instead of black.
But they are still made of plastic, would eventual weathering meaning plastic bits mixing with drinking water? (Kind of what happens in the oceans when plastic junk accumulates and weathers)
rubber duckies instead
96 million "shade balls" could only mean one thing right? and im sure you're just itching to crack that joke, but youre wrong.
We've only got 38 million residents, and currently theyre divided up between hollywood, totally insane homeless people, and startup tech firms.
Good people go to bed earlier.
A ball is a sphere. It casts a circular (ovoid) shadow at best. The overlap between balls probably means you're only covering about 80-90% of the surface at best. I suppose they don't mind losing that to allow the water level to rise and fall and have the balls move over each other.
But, to be honest, I can't imagine that's it's not cheaper to just buy a cover of some kind? Getting those things back out is going to be great fun - and expensive - if they get covered in algae, say.
We've been saying to leave a ball in your pond for decades to stop it freezing over completely, is this really such a shocking suggestion that it makes the news here, on Soylent, The Reg and the BBC?
If you'd asked how to shade a reservoir cheaply, I can't believe this would be more than 2nd or 3rd down the list.
All that plastic in an open-air reservoir, under scorching sun, will guarantee that the chemicals in the plastic diffuse into the water. What are the effects of consuming it? Not that the water in the U.S is particularly good anyway, but I hope someone thought about this.
I hope these balls are BPA free so as not to contaminate the water. Being California, my guess is they are, but the article doesn't say.
The result will be a higher temperature of water... which will tend to kill the food the fish need... which kills the fish, and promotes anerobic bacteria...
So if the surface is completely covered with these black ping pong ball like things, doesn't that also reduce oxygen exchange?
Is there a risk that they just turn the lake into an anoxic wasteland (sulfides are quite toxic) if they do this ?
"In the midst of California's historic drought, it takes bold ingenuity to maximize my goals for water conservation," says Mayor Eric Garcetti
Or you could, you know, tell all those rich idiots who insist on acre-sized green lawns in the middle of the desert "tough luck".
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
That is all.
Make that 2008: http://www.popsci.com/holly-ot...
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Its not the people, its the farms, for that particular area.
Droughts happen. They are periodic.
Do us a favor, reduce your carbon footprint, off yourself.
Ideal, spherical cows, I presume in this case?
He's got big balls. And she's got big balls. But they have the biggest balls of them all.
At 0.36 $ each, 96 million balls are a pretty large part.
--
but I'd rather see more desalinization plants. The trouble is shade balls were probably pretty cheap. If you think California lacks the political will to tell their 1% to back off on the water usage try getting the tax raises through needed to support desalinization plants.
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interesting
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So more of our boys can grow boobs. That's just great.
This about a 1000 acre-foot of water savings a year. At about the maximum price paid for an acre-foot (around $100) this is a $100K per year savings. So in a mere 350 years, it will have paid for itself if the drought never ends and allows the price of water to come down.
300 million gallons a year where 3.3B gallons used in 21 days means they save about 2 days worth of water in a year. Wow, they have solved the drought.
So I actually thought California had a water deficiency not a lack of quality? The real problems are not being addressed and never were in a timely fashion. The fact California was warned long ago and given options to install desalinization plants to create a water supply were turned down because of environmental concerns.
We should better conclude that California has simply messed up big time in addressing this and is doing no better now that the drought is in full crisis mode.
... in a vacuum. Don't forget the vacuum!
Please don't feed the idiot trolls.
...every minute...
Sexconker, you do realize that your water rations are going to be cut, you silly Californian cow?
Ezekiel 23:20
Ping Pong balls would have done the exact same thing for $0.03 each, probably less in that quantity.
Gotta love government contracts.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The summary says the reservoir has enough water to supply the city for three weeks. So instead of spending millions to preserve the water, use it up. Let the other supplies have a break for a few weeks, and then you don't have to worry about the empty reservoir.
Those who do not pay attention to the world around them, are doomed to reinvent the wheel (or in this case, balls covering water).
Thirty years ago, I was living in Sweden, where it was already nothing new that you cover an outdoor swimming pool with ping-pong balls to prevent heat losses and related evaporation. How come this was news, and a great stroke of genius, in California?
As an aside, they don't interfere with the use of the pool at all. You can dive in through them.
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They could save more water even cheaper if they ENFORCED the law and arrested RICH PEOPLE continuing to water their lawns despite the drought.
The rich entitled pricks continue to waste water by the millions of gallons because "they pay taxes", and therefore, deserve water more than poor people who want to drink it.
But do you think any millionaire/billionaire will ever serve even a single day in jail? PSHAW. There's a different "justice" system for the ruling class.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
They are creating an environment for an algae bloom that are starting to cause problems everywhere.
The algea blooms, which are not truly algae but are cyanobacteria, use less light(lower wave length) want low oxygen environments with lower water turbulence. And they are creating that.
Once cyanobacteria bloom starts, it's very difficult and costly to control. It' has very few natural predictors, I don't know of any freshwater ones, and worse yet, cyanobacteria can create toxins that have killed dogs running through it.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
For the 1989 Movie The Abyss James Cameron shot the underwater sequences for the film were shot at an unfinished Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant, situated outside Gaffney, South Carolina, which had been abandoned by Duke Power. Two specially constructed tanks were used. The first one held 7.5 million US gallons (28,000 m3) of water, was 55 feet (18 m) deep and 209 feet (70 m) across. At the time, it was the largest fresh-water filtered tank in the world. Additional scenes were shot in the second tank, which held 2.5 million US gallons (9,500 m3) of water. The filmmakers had to figure out how to keep the water clear enough to shoot and dark enough to look realistic at 2,000 feet (700 m), which was achieved by floating a thick layer of plastic beads in the water and covering the top of the tank with an enormous tarpaulin.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
no effing way. Whoever wrote the article probably used to sell data roaming plans for Verizon.
http://verizonmath.blogspot.de/2006/12/verizon-doesnt-know-dollars-from-cents.html
You have to love how they use gallons as a unit of measurement because it gives a really big number - 300,000,000. But in water terms, that's actually very little. That computes out to just under 921 acre-feet, which is the standard unit of measuring large quantities of water. Not so impressive-sounding now, so let's see what the actual costs are. Divide the $34,500,000 cost by the number of acre-feet and then again by the expected lifetime of the balls - say, 20 years. You wind up with $1,900 per acre-foot. This is a lot of money, but California residents and normal businesses normally pay around $1,000 per acre-foot. If you amortize the cost of these balls over the total water going through the system it's still a bit pricey but not insane when you consider the effects of droughts. For example, in Carlsbad, California they are building a desalinization plant with guaranteed annual sales at a cost of just over $2,000 per acre-foot.
Of course, real sanity would address the real causes of the "drought" - the fact that the two groups that use 85% of California's water pay nowhere near this much. Government pays $0 per acre-foot and wastes a breathtaking amount of water. Big agriculture pays around $10 per acre-foot (the small organic farms I buy my produce from still pay the two-orders-of-magnitude-higher residential rates). I'm all for agriculture - California is an amazing place to grow food and provides a huge percentage of the fruits and vegetables consumed in the US - but the artificially low prices have been abused by some farms and orchards. There is still a lot of flood irrigation being used (and some farmers were actually growing rice in the desert). A massive amount of alfalfa is being grown in the desert and then shipped to China, because at the subsidized water prices this is actually cheaper than China growing their own hay. Sit back and bask in that insanity. The government has dumped as much as a third of California's water supply for various environmental purposes - you could argue the costs and merits of this except for the fact that none of these projects are having their desired effect, so all of that water is just pure waste (around 33% of state water usage). And then they threaten to fine us if we water our lawns more than twice a week (> 5% of state water usage).
So anyway, for once, the black balls are the government doing something expensive but not completely stupid. But the fact that this is even necessary due to government stupidity and a breathtakingly colossal mismanagement of a valuable natural resource sort of makes it all moot in the end. There is no shortage due to drought - there's a shortage due to bad policies.
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Why not use a thin layer of biodegradable oil as has been proposed to weaken hurricanes? That would prevent evaporation and cost a lot less, I'd imagine. I doubt the oil would cause problems since the water is likely drained from below the surface. The only downside is the possible damage to wildlife.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Water is already a near-ideal absorber of sunlight, so the black balls shouldn't change much in that respect, except to keep much more of the heat on the surface. They are also quite likely much better heat radiators, which should be even more helpful since the heat will be more concentrated (hotter) and thus radiate far more rapidly.
I also don't know that wind would be a problem - it sounds like they're trying to pack these pretty tightly, so it's not like they're going to be able to freely roll around the surface and lift a film of fast-evaporating water. It'll take a heck of a wind to rotate them against each other, especially considering they're almost completely shielded from the force by their upwind fellows. So most of the time I would suspect they would remain relatively stationary, with their top surfaces getting very hot, and their plastic construction largely failing to conduct that heat down to the water's surface.
I do agree that white balls (preferably a beyond-visual solar white) would seem to be a considerably better solution at first glance, but I can think of several possible confounding factors:
- Longevity: As a rule plastic breaks down rapidly in direct sunlight. These are probably carbon-black, which I suspect is is about as good as it gets for both cost, UV protection, and non-toxicity. Alternate UV-protective dyes are likely to be more expensive, less effective, and more toxic. Plus the faster degradation would increase clean-up and replacement costs as the balls degrade.
- Costs: these balls are already mass-produced for other reservoir-related purposes: a new design would add at least some design and retooling costs
- Testing (money and time): these balls have already been used in reservoirs and thus (hopefully) the health and safety issues have received at least some study. Reformulate the balls and you'll need to do those studies again.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Oh, I should also add another wind-related benefit: All those balls will almost completely shield even the exposed surface of the water from the wind - which should dramatically reduce evaporation rates. Wind being one of the major contributors to evaporation rates.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I am not certain this will work as intended. I'd like to know if they tested them. Is there a physicist in the house? :)
So, flat surface of water, exposed to air and sun. Normal evaporation occurs.
Now, add black plastic balls which:
1. Are black, and therefore collect a lot of heat, providing more energy to cause evaporation
2. take the deep flat surface of the water and spread it out really thin over the surface of the (hot) spheres
3. move around a lot with waves and wind, ensuring that the water film is always replenished on the surface of the spheres, ensuring the most effective evaporation rate.
Doesn't sound like a good plan to me...
As a side note, on a television report, I saw where one of the engineers claimed that there is no leaching of any chemicals from the balls to the water. I think he has probably been lied to on this point, and believes what he heard. I certainly don't.
I just don't think this will be very successful, or at least, not as successful as they are making it out to be.
I wonder what we'll do with 96 million plastic balls when we're finished with them...bury them in some landfill, or ship them to China? Also, won't they break down from sunlight and UV exposure and then affect the water quality? My point here is that, sure it's great that we're possibly mitigating a drought, but at what future environmental cost?
I should at that, once again, this is a great example of humans avoiding addressing the ACTUAL problem, and instead devising a solution that will in time only become an additional problem. Are they have a serious conversation about the amount of water being used for farming ni CA, especially things like almonds? That seems to be one of the underlying causes (that and trying to squeeze millions of people into what amounts to an arid desert).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Hundreds of millions go to landfill - hmm guys its been done...
With the right technology, you might be able to use these things not just to prevent loss of water through evaporation, but actually to reverse it:
"Each bush, each weed you see out there in the erg," she said, "how do you suppose it lives when we leave it? Each is planted most tenderly in its own little pit. The pits are filled with smooth ovals of chromoplastic. Light turns them white. You can see them glistening in the dawn if you look down from a high place. White reflects. But when Old Father Sun departs, the chromoplastic reverts to transparency in the dark. It cools with extreme rapidity. The surface condenses moisture out of the air. That moisture trickles down to keep our plants alive."
- from Dune, Frank Herbert
I rather hope they are thinking ahead. A lot of hot plastic balls could unleash all kinds of badness into the water
I know nothing, but when I put a ball into a bowl of water, it naturally rolls around in the gentle current. Like a ball-point pen, the ball picks up some water, spreading it over the ball.
Wouldn't that thin layer over a sunny ball evaporate faster? And would the over-all wet-ball surface simply be a larger surface area than the otherwise planar surface -- also contributing to greater evaporation?
And if the entire body of water is only good enough for 3 weeks of water, then isn't this kind of "conservation", by reducing the evaporation of water into the atmosphere just completely insignificant? Should they be focussing on getting more water -- i.e. rain?
They've already done tests on other setups that are much larger than a backyard pool and found it reduced evaporation ~30%.
With all the toxicity of plastic heated by the sun getting in bottled water, it surprises me that California of all places would put plastic in their drinking water.
Throwing that much shade.
I could have done it at less than half that price, just by buying breast balls off of Alibaba.
Breasts, breasts as far as the eye can see.
In other news, thousands of Golden Retrievers have been observed hitch-hiking to Los Angeles to participate in an event described by one traveller as, "a canine Burning Man festival". "It's like somes guy just kept throwing balls and throwing balls, but der was no dog to go get 'em," said Max, a 7-year-old neutor from Chicago.
In the Cordwainer Smith book Norstrilia , the protagonist buys Earth, and is astonished when he comes to visit that the rivers are not covered, that evaporation runs rampant -- unlike back on his home world of Norstilia. Over the three decades I've lived in California, and especially over the last few years, that part of the book seems more and more like reality.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
California and Governor Moonbeam will never be serious about ending the drought until they admit that the only real solution is to build infrastructure to capture rain water instead of funneling it out to the bay.
Evaporation rate is proportional to surface area. Floating anything on the surface reduces the exposed surface area. Individual floating balls work much better than tarps, coverings, etc, because they are self-supporting and do not obstruct access to the surface (fish, boats, swimmers, etc). This is a simple and clever idea.
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Apparently, plastic can leach chemicals such as DEHA, a possible human carcinogen, and benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP), a possible hormone disruptor. What are endocrine disruptors? "Endocrine disruptors and man-made chemicals that alter, mimic or block hormone production or the system that carries them. You can call these external stressors, while your internal stressors that affect the system are rooted in negative emotions, fear, trauma and stress." "Some of these disruptors are surprisingly abundant in your internal and home environment. Here are some of the most common ones, along with the products that often contain them: Bisphenol: BPA, BPS in *plastics* and in the lining of canned goods. " http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0...
So, "acre-foot" is now the standard unit for measuring water quantities? Last time I checked, the standard unit was cubic metres...
The balls are good for 10 years, at which point they will be collected and recycled.
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China and the EU have some of the most restrictions, but their standard of living is FAR below the US which has no child count restrictions or consumption regulations.
Float solar cell rafts on top to shield the water from the sun and limit evaporation somewhat. And generate power at the same time.
Not my idea: someone proposed that we do this on Lake Powell, which loses enough water every year to fill the water needs of a pretty large city, maybe even Phoenix.
--PM
We let our lawn turn brown and did our part to save water.
Then after a month or so driving around the neighborhood we noticed most lawns were quite green and lush.
So much for "saving water"...
That isn't the problem of LA Water and Power, they aren't responsible for setting agricultural policy.
So they have a reservoir. They have a way to solve a problem with bromate formation that they found reduces evaporation.
Why shouldn't they fix it while other people argue about whatever other crap you want?
Depends on what you're measuring. Since you're mainly using the water for agriculture, and the fields tend to need so many inches of water and are measure in acres, the natural unit would be "acre-foot". Kind of like using "board-foot" for measuring lumber.
Los Angeles, where swishing millions of black balls in the water actually improves the water quality.
Anyone who has studied metallurgy will recognize that the balls organize themselves into crystals. You can see this here:
http://lh5.ggpht.com/-INKZxzdKH34/TrvygG29zFI/AAAAAAAARlY/JmZE29vN5Kk/ivanhoe-resorvoir-93.jpg?imgmax=800
Groups of balls form regions of hexagonal patterns, and each region has a different orientation from its neighbor regions.
See also wikipedia on metal grains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_boundary
This being California, Prop 65 must come into play.
"...known to cause cancer or birth defects or other reproductive harm..."
I'm curious to know what material (plastic) the balls are made of and the mold release used during the production process. Sure, just one "toxic" ball is not enough to poison the folks drinking the water, but multiply that by 96 friggin million times... you might just have a real toxic problem.
Life is in a state of dynamic equilibrium, it both blows and sucks
This technique has been used in the chem industry for decades.
I was shown some polypropylene hollow shperes manufactured by a UK company called Alplas in the mid 1980s.
Given that I can get ping pong balls retail at $0.08/ball including shipping, I think they got ripped off.
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The end result looks like a crowded inner city public pool on a hot summer day.
I know all you super smart people think it even matters what the fuck they put in there, but none of you super brains realized that if you stop the water cycle it will stop raining. If evaporation doesn't happen, the clouds can't develop and filter the water. Which means no more naturally fresh water. Which means even more non existent money gets spent to try and filter whats left in the end. Good job stupid fucking man kind.