Yacht Harbor sunset
 If water matters to you, read 
Water Matters ©
The newsletter of the Highland Lakes Group
 

Volume 17-8                                                     November, 2010
In This Issue
Legislative Update
Desalination
LCRA Water Supply Study
HLG Directors 

Rusty Allen - Lago Vista   
David Deeds - Jonestown
John Graham - Tow
Jay Harris -  Buch. Dam
Dewey Hollingsworth -
     Spicewood
Will Mitchell - Austin
Barker Keith -  Hills      
Cole Rowland - Lakeway
Leon Seidl - Kingsland
David Steed - Austin
Pat Wendland - L'way

Legislative

Update 

Members of the Texas Legislature who are interested in water issues have expressed the opinion that the 2011 session will not be a "water session." Among the top ten priority issues, the budget, redis-tricting, border security, voter ID,  and school finance will be the top five, and water will be lucky to be among the top ten. So, the difficult task of finding the means of funding the infrastructure needed to avoid a water crisis in Texas (dams, etc.) will probably need to wait for a future session.

  

Desalination

The Texas Water Development Board recently sponsored a two-day conference in San Antonio on the subject of innovative water supply alternatives, including desalination, rainwater harvesting, wastewater reuse and aquifer storage and recovery. This article will be the first of a series of articles based on papers from that conference.

 

Technology- The first desalination plants used evaporation to separate the salt from the water. This method was energy-intensive and, because the amount of energy required to convert a molecule of water to vapor is a constant in nature, there were limited opportunities for improving efficiency.

read on

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  LCRA Water Supply Study

The LCRA board, at its October meeting, approved the Long Range Water Planning Study. This project began in 2008 with a series of public input meetings and evaluates a number of water sources which would supplement the LCRA's surface water right on the Highland Lakes. The alternative sources, including groundwater, off-channel reservoirs, aquifer storage and desali-nation, were compared on a cost basis and the best placed on a time line estimating when they would be needed (see Water Matters, March, 2010).