Next month, the Santa Barbara City Council will take a critical action to rehabilitate our mothballed desalination plant. I support the project, despite my misgivings about its environmental impacts. As one mitigation to the plant’s enormous energy demand, I will also support funding a study of Community Choice Energy, one of our best options for greening up the region’s energy portfolio.
We’re experiencing the hottest, driest four-year period in recorded history, and Santa Barbara’s customary water sources are petering out. With a 25 percent cut in use, we will have enough water to make it through 2016. But without major rainfall in the winter of 2016-17, we’ll have less than half our normal supply. Cutting our use in half in less than two years would be very tough, indeed. The Santa Barbara landscape would suffer irreparable damage.
Last winter, we started looking in earnest at firing up our mothballed desalination plant. The desal plant was built in a panic 25 years ago when the unthinkable occurred — Gibraltar went dry, and Cachuma nearly did so. Now, lake levels are once again low and dropping fast. The state water system, in which we invested hundreds of millions of dollars, will deliver only a tiny fraction of our allocation.