LOS ANGELES TIMES
By Phil Diehl

Carlsbad — As of Friday, 10 workers are quarantined inside the Carlsbad desalination plant for the next three weeks, monitoring and adjusting gauges and switches, watching for leaks, and doing whatever is needed to safeguard San Diego County’s only significant local source of drinking water.
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​“We asked some employees to be locked down at the plant for 21 days to isolate the risk of infection,” said Gilad Cohen, chief executive of IDE Americas, the global company that operates the Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant and others around the world.

The request for volunteers was a precaution against the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Precautions taken to ensure reliable water supply during pandemic

SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE
By Phil Diehl

CARLSBAD — As of Friday, 10 workers are quarantined inside the Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plan for the next three weeks, monitoring and adjusting gauges and switches, watching for leaks, and doing whatever is needed to safeguard San Diego County’s only significant local source of drinking water.
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​“We asked some employees to be locked down at the plant for 21 days to isolate the risk of infection,” said Gilad Cohen, CEO of IDE Americas, the global company that operates the Carlsbad plant and others around the world.

Team of mission-critical employees proactively lock in at Carlsbad plant to ensure continued production of a safe water supply
 
​CARLSBAD, Calif., March 18, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The following is a statement from Poseidon Water, manager of the Claude "Bud" Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant.

"As manager of the Claude "Bud" Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant in San Diego County, our top priority is to ensure the health and safety of the employees and compliance with stringent state and federal standards for the production of a safe and healthy drinking water supply. With the COVID-19 pandemic, we are taking extraordinary steps to ensure there is uninterrupted production and delivery of safe and reliable water for San Diego County. In response to the rapidly evolving situation, we have been working with our Plant Operator (IDE Americas Inc.) to assemble a team of mission-critical employees to shelter in place at the Carlsbad plant. 

Facility ownership transfer approved by Water Authority Board; Poseidon to continue plant management
 
Carlsbad, Calif. (October 24, 2019) – Bonds from the Carlsbad Desalination Plant and pipeline were upgraded to BBB and given a stable outlook in a new report from Fitch Ratings, affirming the project’s sound management and its ability to provide a stable, reliable source of drinking water to the San Diego region. As the largest, most technologically advanced and energy-efficient plant of its kind in the nation, the Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant’s stability stems from an effective collaboration between Poseidon Water and the San Diego County Water Authority.
 
That partnership will continue under a transfer of ownership from Orion Water Partners to Aberdeen Standard Investments approved Thursday by the Water Authority’s Board of Directors. The transfer – made public in June – will not alter day-to-day operations at the Carlsbad facility or create a fiscal impact to the Water Authority.

Finance Program Will Reduce Ratepayer Water Costs; Support 3,000 jobs during Construction
 
HUNTINGTON BEACH, CA (October 22, 2019) – Poseidon Water released the following statement in response to today’s announcement that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has selected the proposed Huntington Beach Desalination Project to apply for $585 million in credit assistance under the federal government’s Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA).
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“We are pleased by the U.S. EPA’s acknowledgment that the Huntington Beach Desalination Project is an environmentally sound, regionally significant project that will produce clean, safe drinking water and high-quality jobs,” said Poseidon Water CEO Carlos Riva. “WIFIA will make a tangible difference for Orange County, providing ratepayers with affordable water that is locally controlled and climate resilient.  The program is an excellent example of how the federal government can foster Public-Private Partnerships that modernize our nation’s water infrastructure.” 

Carlsbad, Calif. – Poseidon Water is proud to be part of the National Alliance for Water Innovation (NAWI) Team that was selected to receive $100 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to establish a new Energy-Water Desalination Hub.  The Hub’s purpose is to advance state-of-the-art technology and research in desalination.  Poseidon is a national leader in the development of water supply and treatment projects using a public-private partnership approach and manages the award-winning Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant.
 
Headquartered at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley, California, NAWI was created in 2017 to support the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy-Water Desalination Hub. Along with co-founding laboratories Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, NAWI brings together a world-class team of industry and academic partners to examine the critical research needed to radically lower the cost and energy consumption required for desalination.
 
Since September 2017, Poseidon has been supporting NAWI and LBNL in their efforts to plan and conduct water research and compete for the DOE’s much-anticipated Energy-Water Desalination Hub funding.  On Monday, DOE Secretary Rick Perry announced NAWI as the winner of the DOE’s competition at the 2019 WEFTEC Conference in Chicago.  NAWI is expected to receive $20 million per year in research funding with $40 million having already been appropriated to support the Hub’s activities.
 
The NAWI team has a vision to dramatically expand the availability and reliability of water supplies in the U.S. by executing an integrated portfolio of research and development activities to enable new treatment technologies to purify nontraditional water sources at an equivalent cost and energy consumption level as conventional freshwater resources. The team has assembled a core group of industry partners, including Poseidon Water, to help design a research program that is aligned with the needs of the broader U.S. market.
 
The Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant and Poseidon Water are uniquely situated to advance the goals of the Hub and rapidly scale-up and deploy new cutting-edge water technologies. Poseidon and the Carlsbad Desalination Plant will play a central role in the Hub’s ongoing planning and research.
 
The Carlsbad Desalination Plant is the largest, most energy efficient and environmentally-sensitive seawater desalination plant in North America. Poseidon is providing the NAWI team with access to the Carlsbad Desalination Plant and its operating data. NAWI researchers hope to use the Plant to guide their research and development activities and eventually use the Plant as a unique piloting and demonstration site for technology scale-up.
 
Poseidon is excited to be supporting the NAWI team and providing real-world data and access to a large-scale seawater desalination facility. For more information on some of the ongoing research that LBNL is already conducting at the Carlsbad Desalination Plant please visit: http://www.poseidonwater.com/news-and-events/poseidon-water-partners-with-lawrence-berkeley-national-laboratory-on-algal-bloom-research.
 
To learn more about NAWI, please visit: https://www.nawihub.org.
 
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About Poseidon Water – Poseidon Water LLC (Poseidon) is a leading U.S. water infrastructure developer and public-private partnership specialist. Poseidon implements state-of-the-art technologies, management expertise, and innovative financing solutions to design projects that meet its clients’ individual needs. Poseidon is a portfolio company of Brookfield Infrastructure Partners L.P. (NYSE:BIP, TSX: BIP.UN) which is affiliated with and managed by Brookfield Asset Management Inc. (“Brookfield”; NYSE: BAM, TSX: BAM.A, Euronext: BAMA). Brookfield has a 120-year history of owning and operating real assets and manages a global investment portfolio across 30 countries that includes over $385 billion in assets under management. Poseidon and Brookfield have successfully invested $2.3 billion in the global water infrastructure space, including the internationally-acclaimed Carlsbad Seawater Desalination Plant in Carlsbad, California. For more information on Poseidon’s Carlsbad Desalination Plant, visit the plant website at carlsbaddesal.com. For more information on Poseidon’s Huntington Beach desalination plant visit the project website at HBfreshwater.com.
 
 
 

​Poseidon Water (“Poseidon”) would like to congratulate Dr. Michelle Newcomer and Dr. Yiwei Cheng on receiving a Laboratory Directed Research and Development grant to support their algal bloom research.  Dr. Newcomer is a Research Scientist in the Climate & Ecosystem Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (“LBNL”) and a member of the Watershed Function SFA 2.0 Team at LBNL. Her Co-Principal Investigator, Dr. Cheng, is also a Research Scientist at LBNL involved in high performance modeling of environmental and energy systems.
 
This prestigious award will support the team’s work to assess Climate and Hydrological Controls on Coastal Algal Blooms. The purpose of this research is to create a new ‘systems based’ paradigm, linking together these non-linear drivers, for predicting and understanding algal bloom occurrence.
 
Algal blooms create operational challenges for desalination facilities, including Poseidon’s Carlsbad Desalination Project located on the Agua Hedionda Lagoon.  The Carlsbad Desalination Plant is the largest desalination plant in the Nation and provides ten percent of the San Diego region’s water supply.  Poseidon is proud to invite the team to the Carlsbad Seawater Desalination Plant to study the recurring algal blooms in the Agua Hedionda Lagoon and near the Southern California Coast as the team begins developing their model. Poseidon believes that the impacts of this research has wide-ranging benefits across the U.S. and globally as an increasing number of communities look for ways to anticipate and better manage blooms affecting their marine environments, economies, and way of life.

​Dr. Michelle Newcomer https://eesa.lbl.gov/profiles/michelle-newcomer/
Principal Investigator Dr. Michelle Newcomer is a Research Scientist in the Climate & Ecosystem Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She is a member of the Watershed Function SFA 2.0Team and her research focuses on analyzing the effects of climate perturbations on hydrological and biogeochemical cycling in hyporheic zones and as a function of surface water-groundwater interactions. 

Dr. Yiwei Cheng https://eesa.lbl.gov/profiles/yiwei-cheng/
Co-Principal Investigator Dr. Yiwei Cheng is a Research Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Yiwei’s research incorporates rapid integration and development of high performance model/apps, coupled with clean and clear visualization interfaces to solve problems in environmental and energy sectors.
 
 

San Diego Union-Tribune
10/12/17
By Barbara Boxer
 
In December 2015, during California’s most recent drought, Poseidon Water opened a seawater desalination facility in Carlsbad which has since produced over 22 billion gallons of high-quality, drought-proof drinking water for San Diego County.
 
As a United States senator, much of my work included finding innovative solutions to address climate change which would reduce Californian’s pain in the face of predicted droughts. As such, I supported the Carlsbad project and it pleases me that such a huge majority of Californians support seawater desalination as well.
 
California has a great opportunity to replicate the success in Carlsbad through the state’s second large-scale seawater desalination project planned for Orange County’s Huntington Beach. State regulators will decide the fate of the Huntington Beach project in the coming months and much is at stake.
  
Seawater desalination and the Huntington Beach project’s potential is playing out every day in Carlsbad where the facility has a proven track record. It is bringing San Diego County a multitude of benefits including improvements in drinking water quality, attested by water districts through San Diego County from Carlsbad all the way down to the Mexican border, and water agencies have been insulated from mandatory cutbacks because of this climate-resilient water supply.
 
Serving more than 400,000 San Diegans, the Carlsbad plant boasts the only water supply that is not dependent on climate-driven rainfall or snowpack levels. These benefits have not gone unnoticed and the plant has received dozens of national and international awards for its design, energy efficiency and environmental features. In 2016, the State Water Resources Control Board designated the Carlsbad plant as a “drought-resilient” supply, a historic regulatory designation that offers great opportunity for Orange County.
 
Desalination is reliable, and reliability is crucial in the face of climate change which is bringing us horrific fires and droughts and dangerous heat waves. Without careful planning, these disasters put California’s water supply in grave danger. The consequences of being unprepared without a steady supply of water will be disastrous.
 
I have always believed that we must employ every tool at our disposal: recycling, recharging, conservation, and desalination. The Colorado River and the underground water basin, which supply water to part of the Orange County region, are strained and still recovering from the recent drought. The California Department of Water Resources, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the Orange County Water District (OCWD) have stated the need for new, local sources of water and the Huntington Beach plant will expand Southern California’s options, making it less dependent on imported water from either the Colorado River or the environmentally constrained northern part of our state.
 
The Huntington Beach plant will produce 50 million gallons of drinking water per day — at a cost of a half-penny per gallon — regardless of the ongoing weather extremes. Eventually, the facility will be turned over to OCWD.
 
Despite the many wonderful benefits, and the success of Carlsbad, we unfortunately continue to see opposition to this project. It is stunning that a handful of isolated voices refuse to accept sound science and prepare in the face of climate change. These naysayers are behaving like climate change deniers, working, not only against the progress created by innovative environmentally friendly technology but also against a project that addresses California’s need for water in a way that will make it the most environmentally sound desalination plant in the world.
 
These opponents have become so desperate with their false narrative that they are now resorting to personal attacks against me and everyone associated with the project. These are the same people who recognized me with multiple awards for the work we did together in Washington to address the very real crisis of climate change, which always included the need for environmentally smart solutions, like the Huntington Beach project. We see too much of this personally destructive politics in our nation, and I would urge those voices to focus on the facts, not rhetoric.
 
The plant in Carlsbad serves as a shining example of the advances that have been made in pursuit of safe, reliable climate change-resilient water. This should be an issue that brings people together because it addresses the state’s need for water in a responsible and practical manner.
 
The Huntington Beach project is a win-win for all involved and we should all hope to see its benefits come to fruition. This is a legacy issue that will allow future generations to look back and know we made the right decision. Climate change is real, and while we can hope for the best, we must prepare for the worst.
 
Boxer served California in the U.S. Senate from 1993-2017.
 

Orange County, CA (October 2, 2017): Poseidon Water announced a collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to support the development of new water technologies to lower the energy requirements, environmental impacts, and costs of water treatment. Poseidon has offered to share access and operating data from the Carlsbad and proposed Huntington Beach desalination facilities to allow for the development and testing of new water technologies.

“Poseidon Water hopes to lead the advancement of new water treatment technologies, and has significant experience and assets necessary to develop, pilot, scale up, and implement new water technologies,” said Carlos Riva, CEO of Poseidon Water. “Building on our position as an industry leader, Poseidon has an interest in leveraging our resources to help develop more efficient water technologies.”

Poseidon’s Carlsbad Desalination Plant has produced over 22 billion gallons of drinking water since starting commercial operations in December 2015. With the capacity to produce 50 MGD, the Carlsbad facility is the largest and most technically advanced, energy efficient and environmentally sound desalination facility in the Western Hemishpere. Poseidon was recently recognized by San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) as an “Energy Champion” for 2016 for their investments in, and commitment to, sustainability and energy efficiency at the Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant in Carlsbad, CA.

“California has had a history of pioneering technology partnerships in the area of water, and working with Poseidon to advance the latest in desalination technology for the benefit of our state and the nation is intended to further research in this area,” said Dr. Peter S. Fiske, Director of the Water-Energy Resilience Research Institute at Berkeley Lab.

Poseidon’s proposed 50 MGD facility in Huntington Beach, CA is in the late stages of permitting. While the reverse osmosis process to be used by Poseidon’s seawater desalination facilities does not emit greenhouse gases, Poseidon has voluntarily committed to offsetting 100% of the proposed Huntington Beach Desalination Plant’s direct and indirect GHG emissions from the electricity grid through either the purchase of renewable power or the purchase of carbon offsets.
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The Huntington Beach Project will be the first large-scale desalination facility in the world to include 1mm (1/25th inch, approximately the thickness of a credit card) slot width seawater intake screens and through-screen water velocity of less than 0.5 feet per second in an open-ocean setting. The plant will also include state-of-the-art diffuser technology that will ensure that the salinity level in the plant’s seawater discharge meets the State Water Board’s stringent new receiving water quality requirements. These technologies will minimize the intake and mortality of all forms of marine life.

AUSTIN, TX (June 22, 2017) – Poseidon Water, a developer of innovative large-scale water infrastructure projects, applauds Senator Charles Perry, Representative Eddie Lucio III, Gov. Greg Abbott, and the Texas Legislature for the recent enactment of legislation aimed at increasing freshwater supplies in Texas.
 
The new law, known as SB 1430, takes effect in September and is expected to strengthen incentives for the creation of desalinated seawater supplies along the state’s 367-mile coastline by streamlining and expediting the permitting process to extend benefits upstream. It provides that the holders of water rights in any Texas river basin will be entitled to an expedited permit amendment of their existing water rights by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) when they diversify their water supply to include seawater desalination. For applications subject to a hearing, applicants will be entitled to a decision within 270 days on proposals to move their surface water diversion point(s) upstream within the same river basin. The law does not provide those benefits to the transfer of water rights from one river basin to another.
 
“With this new law, the Legislature has taken an important step to promote much needed diversification and expansion of in-state water supplies. It has also shown national policy leadership with an approach that is both environmentally responsible and market-oriented,” said Carlos Rubinstein, Poseidon Water’s Senior Advisor. “We are confident that it will speed up the development of new, drought-proof water supplies through seawater desalination to help meet the urgent needs of Texas’s growing population.”
Passed unanimously by both houses, the law was championed as SB 1430 by Sen. Charles Perry (Senate District 28 and Chairman of the Senate Agriculture and Water Committee) and as HB 2894 by Rep. Eddie Lucio III (House District 38 and longtime champion of seawater desalination). It was signed by Governor Abbott on June 1. Poseidon Water’s CEO, Carlos Riva, said “we applaud and thank Senator Perry and Representative Lucio for their strong leadership on this important issue. They forged an avenue of approach to a statewide challenge that was able to win unanimous, bipartisan support. Poseidon Water would also like to express its appreciation to Governor Abbott for signing SB 1430 into law.”
  
Poseidon Water is a leading U.S. water infrastructure development specialist that employs a performance-based, public-private partnership approach to improve a broad range of municipal water and wastewater infrastructure. Poseidon is a subsidiary of Brookfield Infrastructure Partners and has been actively engaged in Texas since 2013.