World's Largest Desalination Plant Shows the Way

Israel is making the desert bloom. California is making its fields a desert.

by Rod D. Martin
May 18, 2015

While California politicians do everything they can to make their years-long drought profoundly worse, Israel is acting to solve its similar problem. The solution lies on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea just 10 miles south of Tel Aviv.

From the MIT Technology Review:

It is the world’s largest modern seawater desalination plant, providing 20 percent of the water consumed by the country’s households. Built for the Israeli government by Israel Desalination Enterprises, or IDE Technologies, at a cost of around $500 million, it uses a conventional desalination technology called reverse osmosis (RO). Thanks to a series of engineering and materials advances, however, it produces clean water from the sea cheaply and at a scale never before achieved.

700 million people don't have access to clean water. But even if they did, the need for clean water continually arises in areas that have it, and as anyone who's ever seen a South Florida sinkhole can attest, the burde…