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Panel Detail:
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
9:30 AM - 10:45 AM
Ensuring the World’s Water Supply
Speakers:
Joseph Boystak,
President and CEO, Brightwaters Capital LLC
Yoram Cohen,
Director, Water Technology Research Center; Professor, Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of California, Los Angeles
Paul Pelosi Jr.,
President, San Francisco Commission on the Environment
Tom Soto,
Managing Partner, Craton Equity Partners
Susan Weil,
Partner, Lamont Financial Services Corp.
Moderator:
Roy Doumani, Founder, California NanoSystems Institute, University of California, Los Angeles
Some 1.1 billion people around the world lack access to safe drinking water, and growing wealth is leading to increased demand for water-intensive products. With looming challenges such as these, concepts of integration and coordination featured prominently during this panel discussion.
One theme was the need to consider the links between water, energy and carbon, and to develop solutions to those problems in an integrated manner. Another point was the need for greater coordination between different government agencies, and also entities outside of government, to ensure that technologies and management options for dealing with impending water crises are not accidentally stifled by bureaucracy.
The importance of linkages between water and other environmental concerns is crystal clear in California, where, according to Yoram Cohen of UCLA, "19 percent of California's electricity goes to moving water." There are several solutions to this. Cohen and Joseph Boystak of Brightwaters Capital both emphasized that as we go forward, we need to focus on building a distributed water infrastructure somewhat analogous to smart grids and distributed generation in the electricity world; this is a smarter strategy than spending hundreds of billions of dollars just to maintain what we have. Cohen pointed out that when we properly account for the full transportation cost of bringing water to southern California from northern California or Colorado, even desalination is financially viable in many ocean communities.
The panelists provided examples of water-purification technologies that are already viable or soon will be, and interest in such technologies is justified given the burgeoning urban population. As noted by Paul Pelosi Jr. of the San Francisco Commission on the Environment, we are for the first time living in a world housing more than half its population in urban areas. Yet still, as pointed out moderator Roy Doumani of UCLA, 70 to 80 percent of water used goes to agriculture. Panelists agreed on the need for conservation in this area.
But regardless of our technological know-how in either urban areas or agricultural lands, all panelists agreed that solving our water problems required coordination and streamlining of the regulatory and financing process. According to Cohen, it takes seven to eight years for desalination plant to get fully permitted. Pelosi and Susan Weil of Lamont Financial Services Corp. cited the tremendous amount of stimulus money soon to be available for water — but in Weil's words, here in California we are not set up to "push it through the funnel" of Sacramento.
Paul Soto of Craton Equity perhaps summed it up best when he noted there is really no technical obstacle, but one fundamental challenge: the need for "unprecedented collaboration."
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