San Luis Obispo County received a grant of $550,000 from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to study whether desalination could become a local resource in the area.
While this is a matching grant, county officials anticipate the project could cost more than $1 million.
“The fact that they were able to obtain grant funding to do that is a big deal,” said Dawn Ortiz-Legg, San Luis Obispo County District 3 Supervisor. “Again, it’s another example of how hard our staff is working trying to provide the services that we’re here to provide for our citizens.
A plan to bring a desalination plant to the Central Coast is underway.
This means a study will take place to survey the more than 80 miles of ocean frontage along the Central Coast and determine if the area is a good fit to transform seawater into drinking water.
But before determining a final location for the plant, county officials need to gather information in the community to understand what the current water supply needs are.
“The first part of it is a lot of information gathering, so understanding what our current and future water supply needs are,” said Courtney Howard, Water Resources Division Manager, SLO County Public Works. “What we think our existing supplies will look like in our future. What the communities will need. What the technology is out there to take the salt out of the water.”
The county has already coordinated with the countywide water action team and other agencies across the county by creating a 5 phase plan to develop a desalination project.
Angela Ford, the San Luis Obispo DESAL Project Manager, told KSBY News that cities in San Luis Obispo County, major water purveyors, and Santa Barbara County have agreed to be included in this development.
“The first phase of the DESAL Plan is going to be the first couple of years where we identify all the various project concept alternatives and come up with a bidding and ranking criteria to apply to all of the different options and then by the end of those two years under that USBR grant we plan to have a short list of the most promising projects.”
County officials say desalination projects take time to plan, permit, and construct.
“One of the objectives, before we look at desalination of the ocean water, is to make sure that we’re optimizing the use of our wastewater, so making sure we’re recycling our water and putting it to beneficial use, and if that still isn't enough to meet our future needs then we’re going to look at desalination, but it takes a long time to look at the different options, so we’re getting started now,” Howard said.
Factors that contribute to the feasibility of a desalination project are permitting, funding, community support, and environmental protection.
However, the long road ahead of the study is to determine if desalination is the best option.
“With our master water report, we’ll need to prove to the different permitting agencies that we’ve looked at all of the different water supplies and done our best to optimize them, so conservation, recycled water, etc.,” said Ford.
Howard believes it will take nearly 5 years to gather all the information for their study before determining where a desalination plant could be placed in San Luis Obispo County.
