Eli5: why haven’t we started considering or implementing large scale desalinization in response to our water shortages?
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It’s very expensive, it costs about ~$4 per thousand gallons to produce (not counting initial building of the plant or upkeep costs), which is actually relatively pretty affordable for home use; drinking, showering etc.
However it’s extremely expensive for farms to use, corn for instance uses ~600,000 gallons per acre (significantly more in places that aren’t humid like California/Arizona/Nevada etc.), even if sold at cost, it would cost ~$2500 to grow an acre of corn.
In most places in the US that face drought the real issue isn’t that there isn’t enough water for household applications; drinking water, showering, or even wastefully watering lawns. A very large issue is people trying to grow crops where it shouldn’t make sense, trying to literally irrigate parts of a literal desert (like inner Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico) especially to grow really water intensive crops like almonds, pistachios, alfalfa, etc. is the main driving force that’s depleting water reservoirs.
Essentially, the way I understand it, in a lot of cases it would just be cheaper to pay them not to plant crops, and not bother building and maintaining a desalination plant.
TLDR; it’s very expensive, not too expensive for drinking or everyday use, but very expensive to try and use it to grow crops. And most of the issues of water shortages could be solved by implementing some system where less (or even no) crops (especially water intensive ones) are grown in deserts.
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