[pilom]

Anything is possible for enough money but I don't think you understand how much money what you're proposing would cost. In electricity alone desalination costs around 3kwh/m^3. 3.7mwh/acre foot of water. Last year we got 9.2 million acre feet of water in the Colorado River of the allocated 15 million acre feet. So if we say we want to supplement flows with just 2 million acre feet of desalination water, that's 7 Pwh of electricity. Per year. That's approximately 1000x the annual generated power of the largest nuclear plant in the world.

And we haven't even pumped that water 3700 feet up from sea level to the elevation of lake Powell.

[Syonyk]

Hm. Your numbers and mine don't match by a few orders of magnitude. I came up with 2.5GW sustained, which is (2.5GW * 24h * 365) 21900 GWh ~= 21TWh/yr. Big, but not the same as your value.

An acre foot is 1233 m^3, and at 3kWh/m^3, that's 3.7 MWh/acre foot. Math checks out so far.

Times 2000000, that's 7400000 MWh / 7400 GWh / 7.4 TWh.

I think you're off by a factor of 1000 somewhere in your math. You're looking at ~the output of a large nuclear plant, not 1000 of them.

Or my math is wrong. That's entirely possible too.

[nostrademons]

I get your numbers. I think OP skipped a prefix somewhere in the mega-giga-tera-peta hierarchy.

[zeroonetwothree]

To put it in perspective, Bitcoin mining alone is more than three times that.

[cplusplusfellow]

We don’t need to pump the water to lake Powell. We let Powell refill itself and use the water instead on level ground in California.

[InitialLastName]

> That's approximately 1000x the annual generated power of the largest nuclear plant in the world.

Put another way, it's almost 40x the annual generated power of the State of California.

[elliottkember]

This is a great comment. Thank you for doing the math. I thought the word "just" was doing a lot of work in the original comment.