Panel
Staying Afloat During the Drought: Using Technology to Reshape Our Relationship to Water
Milken InstituteSteve Gregory, Kelly Sanders, Nick Haan, Lorcan O’Herlihy, David R. Pettijohn, Andrew Fahlund, Matt Horton
- Event Context: The Milken Institute and KPCC co-hosted a forum on California's drought and water policy, moderated by KPCC's Steve Gregory, featuring experts from the California Water Foundation, Singularity University, architecture, DWP, and USC.
- Drought Context: A four-year drought has exposed the unsustainability of California's traditional water reliance, with state climate models predicting significantly hotter, drier conditions and population growth by 2040.
- LA DWP Goal: The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) aims to cut reliance on imported water by 50% by 2024, a mandate set by the Mayor via executive directive.
- Current Conservation Levels: L.A.'s per capita water usage has dropped from 189 gallons to 109 gallons per day (all-in including industrial/commercial losses) over the last few years.
- Singularity University Challenge: Nick Hahn's team collected ~1,000 global submissions for creating new water sources, with the challenge closing on Friday; top three teams providing the most water win the competition.
- Technology Focus Areas: Submissions include atmospheric water capture at scale, offshore desalination barges to mitigate coastal impacts, and graphene-based membranes for reverse osmosis to reduce energy demands.
- Urban Metabolism Concept: Dr. Kelly Sanders advocates for treating energy, water, and wastewater as an interconnected system, noting that water conservation saves embedded energy and vice versa.
- Decentralization Trend: Panelists anticipate a shift from centralized water systems to decentralized solutions where homes and neighborhoods capture, store, and reuse water locally.
- Architectural Strategy: Lorcan O'Herlihy proposes hybridizing infrastructure and housing, designing roofs and walls to capture stormwater for cisterns or groundwater recharge rather than routing it to the ocean.
- Stormwater Capture Strategy: David Pettijohn outlines a three-pronged DWP strategy: centralized capture (dams/spreading basins), neighborhood-level capture (infiltration galleries), and residential incentives (rain barrels, cisterns).
- Residential Incentives: DWP offers $100 per rain barrel (up to four), $1.75 per square foot for lawn removal, and potential cistern rebates to encourage distributed water capture.
- Policy Silo Challenge: Andrew Falland identifies "siloed" management (separate agencies for landscape, supply, and treatment) as a primary barrier to innovation, urging alignment of policies and incentives across agencies.
- Public Sentiment: Polling indicates 86% of Californians view the drought as "very" or "extremely" serious, a level of consensus rarely seen except during the 2000s energy crisis.
- LA River Tension: A conflict exists between restoring the LA River to a natural state and diverting dry-weather flows (currently from wastewater/stormwater) to recharge groundwater or cisterns.
- Desalination Constraints: Dr. Sanders warns that desalination is energy-intensive and creates high-salinity brine waste, creating a positive feedback loop of environmental impact that makes it less viable than wastewater reclamation.
- Efficiency vs. Usage Paradox: Saving water in agriculture does not automatically free up supply for cities; saved water often fuels the expansion of farming or groundwater pumping unless regulated by markets or policy.
- Groundwater Regulation: California recently passed legislation to regulate groundwater for the first time in a century, aiming to stop the "leaky bucket" phenomenon where surface cuts trigger unchecked groundwater pumping.
- Crop Transition: High costs of groundwater pumping are forcing Central Valley farmers to switch to high-value, non-fallow crops like almonds, complicating drought-fallowing agreements.
- Pricing Reform Barrier: Current legal interpretations (e.g., San Juan Capistrano case) require water rates to strictly match cost-of-service, preventing penalty tiers for conservation; amendments to Proposition 218 may be needed.
- LA DWP Rate Restructuring: DWP plans to move from a two-tier to a four-tier rate structure to better align costs with water production tiers, including tiers for lifeline needs, California-friendly landscapes, and excessive use.
- High-Use Monitoring: DWP is implementing AMI (smart meters) and customized usage reports for top 60,000 customers to identify violations and enforce ordinances against water waste.
- Oil & Gas Water: Kelly Sanders notes oil and gas operations produce ~130 billion gallons of brine; research is evaluating whether this can be repurposed for agriculture or drinking water in rural counties.
- Regional Wastewater Reuse: A pilot project aims to treat the 400 million gallons/day currently discharged by the Carson and Hyperion plants as a "fourth aqueduct" to recharge regional groundwater basins.
- Toilet-to-Tap Perception: Dr. Sanders notes that while "toilet-to-tap" is technically feasible and already happens via indirect reuse, direct potable reuse is legally restricted in most US cities due to "yuck factor" and regulatory limits.
- Water Waste Enforcement: Out of 14,000 reports of water waste in L.A. this year, only 75 resulted in monetary fines, with education and fines (up to $300) followed by flow restrictors used for non-compliance.
- Constitutional Pricing Limits: Panelists argue that California's unique constitutional barriers prevent the implementation of tiered pricing that subsidizes low-income users while penalizing high waste.
- Pipeline Skepticism: Experts dismiss long-distance physical water transport (e.g., Great Lakes to CA) as economically and environmentally prohibitive compared to moving energy or virtual water via trade.
- International Lessons (Australia): Australia's experience shows that while desalination serves as a security blanket, it is prohibitively expensive to run; the lesson is to focus on demand-side management and landscape transformation first.
- International Lessons (Singapore): Singapore prioritizes water security by recycling almost 100% of water and trading food security for water security, utilizing aggressive recycling and vertical farming.
- Emerging Tech: Novel purification methods include Chilean plasma-based water ionization and Dean Kamen's Slingshot, though these remain in pilot phases due to energy constraints.
- Lightning Round Consensus: Panelists identified "conservation" (specifically outdoor landscaping/culture change), "recycled water," and "agricultural drip irrigation" as the highest-value "low-hanging fruit" for immediate drought resilience.