Aerial view of Victoria, Australia sea water desalination plant
Australians protest desalination plant, where protesters make their concerns clear about the desalination plant in Wonthaggi. Picture courtesy of journalist Courtney Biggs and photographer Greg Noakes.
Our water in Northeast Florida is a precious natural resource. Without water, life would not be sustainable. Our tourist economy would dry up and blow away.
Our water is endangered by all sorts of polluters, wastrel developers and unwise decisions by government agencies.
Last night, one of those unwise government decisions was on public display at Marineland. It was embarrassing. And you paid for it. And thanks to public opposition, a bad idea has been mothballed – for now!
Eleven entities – mostly local governments -- wanted to join the controversial St. Johns River Water Management District to spend as much as $1,200,000,000 on the controversial Coquina Coast Seawater Desalination Plant. Seven of them have now dropped out: the Dunes Community Development District, City of Bunnell, Volusia County, City of Mount Dora, Flagler Beach, Flagler County and Marion County. Now there are four: this leaves St. Johns County and the cities of Deland, Palm Coast and Leesburg.
St. Johns County taxpayers spent $50,000 toward our share of the cost. Let’s not spend any more, folks. St. Johns County was allegedly told it would get credit from St. Johns River Water Management District for “conservation” if it kicked into this massive energy-hogging, capital-intensive, greenhouse-gas-causing project. SJRWMD should no longer offer “credit” for wasting public monies on such flummery and dupery. It is at best facetious, and a giant conflict of interest, for SJRWMD to conceive of an energy-wasting plant and then dragoon our governments into paying for it. Giving our St. Johns County government a conservation credit for investing in the desal plant is like fornicating for virginity.
Three professional engineers employed by multinational corporate engineering firm Malcolm-Pirnie – a senior vice president and two vice presidents – held forth last night at the auditorium of the Whitney Laboratory of the University of Florida (which rents for $450 after hours, and gives a faux sense of respectability for the project).
There were the predictable pretty poster-boards on easels, with the standard food and beverage spread that Public Relations conmen use when they try to manipulate citizens. There were the standard misleading PR handouts, complete with errant nonsense and blatant falsehoods – attempting to link this Coquina Coast Seawater Desalination Plant with the words “sustainable” and “conservation.” That’s like putting lipstick on a pig.
It was an enchanted evening, alright.
It was an Orwellian experience, cribbed from the Environmental Information Network’s “Control Game” – all questions were left to the end and their were only vague answers to vital questions (what engineers call “warm fuzzies” or scientists call “drylabbing.”
The Coquina Coast Seawater Desalination Plant proposal has evolved from a massive 900 foot ship off our coast desalinating water to a different kind of plant located on 25-50 acres of land, several miles inland, desalinating water using reverse osmosis (a process that consumes promiscuous quantities of electricity). All of the possible locations for the plant and input and waste pipes are in Flagler County.
After the Coquina Coast Seawater Desalination Plant’s predictable, dull “dog and pony show,” I got to cross-examine the engineers.
Sadly, they lacked knowledge of basic facts. They haven’t analyzed alternatives. They talked down to us. They evidenced the errant attitude exemplified by the title of Calvin Rampton’s book, “Trust Us, We’re Experts.”
The engineers said they were going to “allow the economy” to improve, which sounds rather pompous (like King Canute allegedly ordering the waves of the ocean to recede to impress his courtiers that he was not a deity). Their growth rate projections were wrong – just like the Tennessee Valley Authority and other nuclear electric utilities, when they built nuclear powerplants, claiming growth would continue to skyrocket, and that nuclear power would be too “cheap to meter.” They were wrong. The Coquina Coast Seawater Desalination Plant was wrong in its assumptions about growth, too.
In fact, under cross-examination, one of the three Malcolm-Pirnie engineers admitted there had been discussions with Wall Street bond firms. Thus, the simple palpitating truth of the matter is that Wall Street rejected their project. The Malcolm-Pirnie engineer’s flippant response: they said they hoped for “federal grants” to pay for the $400,000,000 cost after the economy recovers. This thought suggests that the engineers (and partners in the Coquina Coast Seawater Desalination Plant) are not “part of the reality-based community,” to borrow the words of Karl Rove, quoted in Ron Suskind’s famous 2004 New York Times Magazine article.
Florida DEP has never granted a permit for such a coastal plant discharging concentrated seawater, according to the West Volusia paper (below), which reports that DEP would treat the concentrated seawater as “industrial waste.” Those two words were never used last night.
How would the engineers prevent corrosion in large pipes carrying sea water several miles inland? How would they prevent corrosion in large pipes carrying concentrated sea water “industrial waste” over land and back to sea?
One Malcolm-Pirnie engineer mumbled something about “selection of materials,” as if that were the answer.
Pipelines often need chemicals to prevent corrosion: one of the chemicals used in coal slurry pipelines is hexavalent chromium (chromium 6), the same toxic substance that poisoned people in Hinckley, California (events portrayed in the movie Erin Brockovich). Not only were the three Malcolm-Pirnie engineers lacking in knowledge about chemicals preventing corrosion in pipe, one actually claimed never to heard of coal slurry pipelines.
Who’s teaching our engineers, anyway?
For an industrial engineer to say that he’s never heard of coal slurry pipelines would be like a doctor saying he’s never heard of cancer – not exactly the stuff that gives one trust and confidence in their abilities. I suspect the engineers did know what a coal pipeline was, but that they forgot under pressure to prevaricate for SJRWMD, which wanted no discussion of pollution to worry us hicks in St. Johns and Flagler Counties.
It’s an old saw that “a diplomat is a person sent abroad to lie for his country.” With large capital-intensive projects, there are phalanxes of testa-liars (as Alan Dershowitz calls them), ready, willing and able to subvert democracy with prevarication.
The three engineers thought that the plant would be obliged to buy power from Florida Power & Light (which was a partner in the plant but dropped out).
This is untrue, as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has had the power to order wheeling and interconnection since U.S. Rep. Ed Markey’s 1992 amendment to the Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act (PURPA), a federal energy law (finally writing into federal law something Senator James R. Sasser tried to do in 1977, when I was advising him on energy and natural resources legislation). I told the engineers they needed to consult an antitrust lawyer with the law firm of Holland & Knight – not just take someone’s word for it that FP&L “owns the grid” and that the plant would be a captive customer of one utility monopolist.
Bottom line: electric power could be shipped in from municipal systems such as Gainesville, Orlando, Tallahassee or Jacksonville. Of course, this is Florida, or “Flori-duh” as USA Today called it during the 2000 recounts. FP&L has such great influence that SJRWMD and its stable of engineers thought they were somehow obliged to buy FP&L’s power because “they own the grid.”
More importantly, the multinational corporation’s engineers assumed that FP&L would have a spare 15 megawatts of electricity for them to waste on the Coquina Coast Seawater Desalination Plant.
They said they were told that there would be available power by FP&L. There is no contractual commitment and no expectation that they could enforce this gratuitous promise – what reasonable plant-builder would not get a signed contract? Color Malcolm-Pirnie engineers either hopelessly provincial or extremely gullible.
Most likely, FP&L was licking its chops at the possibility of lugubrious goobers allowing FP&L to co-locate a powerplant next to the desalination plant (which is often the case). FP&L might have even co-located a nuclear powerplant, with the blessing of SJRWMD & local governments. FP&L is doing little to conserve energy at its powerplants, which waste 2/3 of all the energy consumed by not recycling the waste heat, which is mindlessly emitted into the sky (or into water).
Fortunately, any chance of building a powerplant in Flagler County is nil, thanks to public opposition and the Great Recession.
This was Amateur Hour, brought to you by the St. Johns River Water Management District.
Instead of conserving water, SJRWMD is shipping our water to Orlando.
If this were Israel or Saudi Arabia or other dry place, then desalination would make sense.
We in Florida are blessed with copious quantities of water, which we need to conserve and regulate better.
The Coquina Coast Seawater Desalination Plant would be the wrong plant, in the wrong place, at the wrong time for the wrong reason.
I hope that the Coquina Coast Seawater Desalination Plant is never built.
The half-baked notion of a Coquina Coast Seawater Desalination Plant reminds me of what my onetime public sparring partner at the Tennessee Valley Authority, former TVA Chairman S. David Freeman, said of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor: Freeman called the CRBRP “a technological turkey.”
Footnote: S. David Freeman, known for his tart tongue and intellect on energy and water issues, has during his career shut down a number of “technological turkeys” all over the country. Freeman once called me “the biggest smartass” he “ever met” in a conversation with the late Nashville Tennessean Pulitzer Prize winner Nat Caldwell; I was a beardless youth of 21 at the time, working on a Fund for Investigative Journalism grant in 1978 and asking then-Director Freeman questions about antitrust violations, fraud and the family coal land of then-Senator Howard Henry Baker, Jr. and whether Freeman could “penetrate” the TVA bureaucracy and make President Carter’s energy goals into TVA policy). Freeman and fellow TVA Director Richard Freeman (no relation) answered press and public questions and brought transparency, openness and a sense of humor to an authoritarian, hierarchical monster of a federal bureaucracy, one that the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas once compared to arrogant Soviet central planning bodies. Once I asked Freeman a question about pesticide-spraying along power lines of a chemical cousin Agent Orange, or something like that, and he said, “that’s another have you stopped beating your wife question, Ed.” Of course, when Ronald Wilson Reagan appointed at TVA Chairman the fiendish Nissan executive Marvin Runyon (later Postal Service Chairman), TVA reverted to its old back-slapping good-ole boy days – no longer did TVA Board members answer questions – instead, they just stared at (and objectified) citizens, holding “Public Listening Sessions” with expressionless faces, folded arms and closed minds.
St. Johns River Water Management District, like TVA, badly needs reforming. Like TVA, SJRWMD needs to learn right from wrong. It needs to learn that wasting hundreds of millions (or billions) on an energy-hogging Coquina Coast Seawater Desalination Plant is no answer to our water problems.
As President Jimmy Carter said in a televised speech to our Nation on April 20, 1977, “Our energy problems and our environmental problems have the same cause – wasteful use of resources. Conservation solves both problems at once.”
I’m still asking questions (much to the annoyance of three engineers), though the schedule meant that I complied (unwittingly) with my mother’s rule when I was a child: “No questions after eight o’clock.”
What do you reckon?
For more on our SJRWMD, read my 2006 article, "The Matrix -- Wetlands of Mass Destruction -- Why Florida's wetlands are being destroyed and who benefits."
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