To fix the problems facing swimming pools how about collecting rain water off roof tops maybe even putting a big tarp over all of the tennis courts to help the effort. We haven’t looked into anything but life as usual. Wait until old is $200 per barrel before you start looking at subsidised mass transit. Atlanta is spoiled and it shows.

Assuming for the moment that the desal and pumping numbers/calculations are correct, the energy requirements to supply Atlanta with desalinated water are sobering. I have a hard time fathoming that when ALL OF US need to curb our future energy use, that building 650 MW of additional generating capacity to supply Atlanta with potable water is an attractive solution. That is, of course, in addition to the extra generation the south (nay, the entire country) will need to meet additional a/c demand.

I’m not discounting many other solutions to both the water and the energy equation. It just doesn’t seem that pumping desal water up to Atlanta will be among the solutions.

Having said that, I’m also trying to imagine a way past the present interstate compacts regarding water rights and ACF water entering into FLorida while verging on the pollyanna statement: “we must better manage the resources immediately in our back yard.” The watrer equation in Atlanta is complex, and I doubt that there is an easy solutions.

It does seem, though, that a problem this complex will draw on and strengthen: intellectual capital, community solutions, and community action. Atlanta’s water problem now will be other city’s water problem in the future. For Atlanta, 2008 may be a decisive year (I refrained from saying “watershed year”), but one thing very clear to me is that smart, concerned, and dedicated people make up the fabric of Atlanta’s communities. Much good can come from Atlanta’s experience with the water shortage, including a road-map of creative problem solving processes and techniques, as well as a sound water use solution.

Many Americans will be watching and hoping for Atlanta.

http://www.ajdesigner.com/phppump/pump_equations_water_horse_power.php

I entered a figure for 500 Million gallons / day which would take Atlanta metro entirely off the ACF “grid”. That equates to 347222 gallons / minute to plug into their formula. I used 1000 feet as the head.

This comes out to approx 65 Mega Watts driving an 87,000 horsepower pump just to move the water to Atlanta.

As far as the desalination process itself, I found this reference
http://www.energycentral.com/centers/energybiz/ebi_detail.cfm?id=433
which says a “300-megawatt nuclear plant would be required to drive a desalination facility with a capacity of 1 million cubic meters of potable water a day” That equates to approx 264 million gallons per day - about half of what Atlanta metro needs.

So figure maybe 650 Megawatts of power which is a very nice size nuclear plant. In comparison, the Scholz power plant which we are sending water downstream to cool generates 85 Mega Watts.

But recently the whole development of the study of global warming is that climate change is happening now, and more quickly than has been expected, and there is every reason to believe that the drought in the tri-state area is part of that development. We’re not talking about 2030 any more, but 2010, and really, that’s now, as far as Georgia is concerned.

I think, personally, it is very dangerous when people say “when this drought is over”. It would be much better to say, this may be the beginning of a long term shift in rainfall patterns, stretching from here to Texas, so let’s work on that basis.

Having said that, hurricanes may come to the rescue in a year or two’s time, but with a vengance that will be worse than the drought. There is increased energy in the weather systems due to global warming.

It’s true that the La Nina will roll over at some point and the old El Nino will come back. It’s also possible that, with extra heat in the system, it may even make the 2005 hurricane season look mild.

The El Nino, which brings hurricanes, has increased from occuring one year in five to staying around for a good few years. But over 2006 the weather was slowly turning back to la Nina.

But it’s also possible that the “persistent jet stream pattern [which] has set up that steers storms away from the region” will continue to steer storms away in the hurricane season.

Also, this guy is being a little odd in saying that global warming is not the cause but could be in the future. That may be true that warming isn’t happening now, but the climate is a complicated beast and variability in weather patterns as things shift to a new equilibrium, or maybe this is the new climate pattern for the southeast U.S. due to changes elsewhere. This same effect is why some parts of the Antarctic is getting some more snow than usual, things warmed somewhere else to bring the wet weather. Another way to put it is that on average things are warming, but the standard deviation is so high that for a given area it is impossible to predict precisely what will happen. So you can’t prove it either way: climate change could be making an average drought worse, or maybe not. There’s no way to know.