Thank you for your comments.
I have been engaging with experts and preparing to talk to experts at the Bureau of Reclamations, one pumped hydroelectric power producer in California, the San Diego County Water Authority and experts at the Carlsbad desalination plant. I have some notes on the Power and Water Park civil engineering and costs as the concepts and cost stand as of this point. I will attach the notes below.
Notes on Civil Engineering for Power and Water Park at Camp Pendelton
I am interested in a possible project and facilities at Camp Pendelton that would produce about twice as much desalinated water as the Claude "Bud" Lewis Carlsbad Poseidon Plant that exists a few miles to the south. The proposed facility could produce about 100 million gallons of desalinated sea water per day, over 100-thousand-acre feet per year. The facility would also combine peak-demand-power provided by pumped hydroelectric energy storage, and use mixed renewable energy applications that could, at the least, provide for all the facility's power needs and store about 15 million kilowatt hours of energy in the form of desalinated water in the upper reservoir as reserves for cloudy or windless days. The facility should provide over two gigawatts of peak-demand stabilizing power to the grid onto existing San Onofre Nuclear Plant transmission lines to offset evening power demands with significant reserves. The processes to desalinate sea water should benefit from well-filtered sea water (to less than 5 microns) that has been elevated to reservoirs about 400 meters above sea level (about 600 psi water pressure) within about 1 kilometer of the proposed new desalination plant near the coast. The project would be to design a Power and Water Park at Camp Pendelton near San Onofre Beach and about one or two miles from the decommissioned San Onofre 2GW nuclear power plant and about 12 miles north of the Claude "Bud" Lewis Carlsbad Poseidon Desalination facility.
One kilowatt hour of energy costs about 25 cents in California. The proposed hydroelectric facility would produce six-million-kilowatt hours per day at times of peak demand. The energy would have a value of at least $1.5 million per day, $5.4 billion over ten years, and its value is likely to increase.
One cubic meter of drinking water costs about $1.2 currently. 400,000 cubic meters is worth about $480,000 per day and 1.7 billion over ten years.
The major dams on the Colorado river have been experiencing "drought conditions" for 23 years and are now at less than one third of their capacity.
Further restrictions of the flow that San Diego County depends on are very likely.
A large variable regarding the feasibility and economic costs is the civil engineering that could involve excavating about 5 to 10 million cubic meters of bluff material, loose sandstone, from Horno Canyon for a lower dam-type reservoir near sea level. The excavated materials would be relocated to create elevated reservoirs at about 400 to 450 meters of elevation near the San Onofre peak (500 meters elevation). The excavated materials would also be used to create a seawall and new San Onofre Lagoon parallel to the San Onofre Beach.
There are four major civil engineering construction projects that need to be evaluated:
1) There should be a dam / reservoir at Horno Canyon. The dam is to hold about 20 million to 30 million cubic meters of desalinated water (16 to 24 thousand acre-feet of water). The water is a reserve of drinking water for about 1 million San Diego County residents, and the marines at Camp Pendelton. This is also the lower reservoir for the storage of about 15 million kilowatts of pumped hydroelectric energy. I estimate that about 5 to 10 million cubic meters of the sandy bluff material will need to be excavated to create a dam with a base a few tens of meters above sea level. The excavated material would then be relocated to provide fill for the other construction projects.
2) Some of the material removed to create the Horno Canyon Dam would be used to make a seawall parallel to shoreline and about 100 meters from San Onofre Beach. The top portion of the wall would be about 8 meters above sea level, the slightly sloped top of the wall is expected to be about 10 meters wide. The wall would extend down about 5 to 6 meters to the ocean floor. The cross section of the wall would be about 210 to 250 square meters. Each kilometer of seawall would require about 210 to 250 thousand cubic meters of the excavated material. The seawall should extend 2 to 4 kilometers, as needed, for adequate device installations and seawater flows.
The sea wall would create a new San Onofre Lagoon and a stable platform for mounting seawater entry and exit pipes, mechanisms to control the flow of water, to prevent stagnation, and facilitate the easy screening and initial filtration of seawater entering and exiting the lagoon using tidal action and the suction of the seawater pumps.
A sea wall would also provide the platform for the stable installation of standard wind turbines and possible wave-energy seawater piston pumps to send the water to elevated reservoirs onshore.
Nearly all the area of the new San Onofre Lagoon and its beach should remain safely accessible for recreation.
3) The proper and adequate grading and compaction of filled areas at and near the upper reservoirs at the top of the bluff is a major part of the civil engineering and construction project. The grading of the fill needs to support at least one "clean salty water reservoir" elevated to about 400 meters above sea level with an area of a little less than one square kilometer and about 3 meters deep. There should also be a larger, desalinated water reservoir for the pumped hydroelectric turbines at about the same elevation. The pumped hydro reservoir should occupy about 2 square kilometers and be about 8 meters deep for adequate energy production and reserves when solar energy is reduced over multiple cloudy days.
4) The grading of the bluff areas onshore from the reservoirs should be uniform to a 20% or 25% grade. This uniform grading will provide for uniform terracing of the several square kilometers of hillside to the north and the east of the reservoirs.
About eight meters of horizontal grade then 2 meters of rise would facilitate uniform standardized installations and maintenance of solar panels at the edge of the terrace walls. The leveled areas could have properly conditioned soils placed below the solar panels with drip irrigation for crops. The space beyond the agricultural areas would have a road accessible for tending crops for local markets and maintaining the PV systems.
I am hoping to engage in dialogs with interested parties and experts, like you, to see if a project to add about 2,000 megawatts of peak-buffering power to the grid using renewable sources and enough desalinated water adequate to supply about 20% of San Diego County's needs would be possible.
I have done some basic estimations of electrical power storage, electrical power production from renewable sources and volumes of desalinated sea water that could be produced from filtered sea water elevated to between 400 to 500 meters above the coast at the San Onofre Mountain on Camp Pendelton property. Energy production of over six million kilowatt-hours per day and 400,000 cubic meters of desalinated sea water per day seem to be realistic using well established technologies. Producing one kilowatt hour of energy using fossil fuels in the U. S. sends .85 pounds of carbon dioxide into the air. The renewable energy produced at the plant could prevent the release of about 5 thousand tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per day, about 1.8 million tons of CO2 eliminated per year.
I would like to talk with some experts in these fields to explore the engineering feasibility of such a power and water park at Camp Pendelton North.
I have USGS contour maps of the areas to be considered. The coastal bluffs have elevations up to 500 meters above sea level and I have outlined possible sites for reservoirs to store desalinated and filtered types of sea water. I would like to contact people, like you, who may wish to help with looking into the physics and engineering of such a project.
Some basic assumptions:
Well filtered sea water elevated to 400 meters above lower reservoir turbine-pumps and 400 meters above reverse osmosis filtration systems would have both on-demand energy storage capacity and would have most of the pressure potential needed for reverse osmosis. The "clean salty" water could be filtered to under 5 microns before it arrives at the elevated reservoir and warmed by sunlight with simple transparent "pool covers" minimizing the need for treatment before reverse osmosis.
It is noted that one cubic meter of water raised to, or dropped from, 370 meters has, or requires, about 1 kilowatt-hour of energy.
Desalination of sea water typically has a high energy cost to prefilter then develop the 800 psi typically needed for efficient reverse osmosis (about 3 to 3.5 kilowatt hours for each cubic meter of seawater to be produced). Well-filtered water elevated to 400 meters already has about 570 psi of available pressure. If it were then to be pumped through any final filtration and then through reverse osmosis modules at the coast below there could be significant savings.
Thank you for your kind attention,
Please contact me at:
InspectorDaveS@gmail.com
Ph# 818-262-1543 (text capable cell)
Dave Short