Policy Question --- Nan Zhang

What actions, if any, should be taken by California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal/EPA) to identify technology that may address concerns about the drinking water shortage in California?

The client is Ms. Felicia Marcus, the chair of state water resource control board in Cal/EPA.

Brief description: California has been facing drinking water shortage problems for decades because of the drought climate and limited drinkable ground water. As San Jose Mercury News [1] stated California began applying ocean desalination technology since 1970s and it has at least fifteen desalination projects until now. Reserve Osmosis (RO) and electrodialysis (ED) are both common and widely spread technologies in this industry. There is no doubt that this desalination industry has become one of the most useful tools to provide drinkable water to the people in California. However, there are also many disadvantages in this industry and it still needs some innovation policies to improve.

Option#1: Maintain status quo. EPA [2] focus more on the water conservation and water use efficiency. They give water conservation tips to the public and tell people how to efficiently use water. In addition, they made a 20x2020 water conservation plan in 2008 [3]. The goal is to achieve a 20 percent reduction in per capita water use statewide by 2020. In this plan, they clearly establish a base line and target and also include many recommendations, e.g. establishing foundation for a statewide conservation strategy.
Advantages:

• Applied to the entire society
• Don't cost too much money
• Ease of political acceptability

Disadvantage:

• Doesn't have significant effect at first

Option#2: EPA should create a communication platform for school and desalination company R&D department. Universities focus their research on the novel desalination technology while the R&D department in companies are more likely to apply the existing desalination technology to a large-scale production. So there is always a gap here. If EPA could be working as a bridge between schools and companies, many novel desalination technologies could be commercializing as early as possible which can results in improving the desalination efficiency and then providing more drinkable water.
Advantages:

• Promote communication and benefit for both university and company  
• Significant effect right away
• ease of political acceptability

Disadvantage:

• Only a small portion of people benefit

Option #3: EPA should input economic incentives for desalination industry. Desalination technology is a complicated process in real plant and requires large amount of money and energy. Especially for startups with novel desalination technology, e.g. Capacitive deionization (CDI), their produced drinkable water may not be competitive in the market because they don’t have any market share yet and also don’t have so much financial support. If EPA can give some financial support, such as tax-free policy, it would be significantly helpful for these startups and promote the development of desalination industry.
Advantages:

• Significant effect right away
• Promote economy development in desalination industry

Disadvantages:

• Only a small portion of people benefit
• Not ease of political acceptability

Criteria evaluation of the options:

Options	Efficiency	Effectiveness	Equity	Ease of political acceptability
Status quo	0	+	+	+
R&D	+	+	-	+
Economic incentives	+	+	-	-

 

Reference:

[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_25859513/nations-largest-ocean-desalination-plant-goes-up-near

[2]http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/programs/drought/conservation.shtml

[3] http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/water_issues/hot_topics/20x2020/index.shtml