Westlands’ lateral thinking

With a hat tip to the SacBee’s Matt Weiser, two recent collaborations by Westlands Water District are to be given props for their forward thinking.

And, remarkably, neither involves water, the Delta, or back room machinations.

In the first, the normally adversarial WWD and Sierra Club have found common ground via the idea of developing fallowed toxic farmland into a huge solar farm. From Barry Nelson at the NRDC Switchboard:

The Westlands Water District has signed a lease with a private investment group as part of an effort to explore a 5,000 megawatt solar power plant on up to 30,000 acres of land.  The project could provide enough power for 2.5 to 4 million California homes.

The DNP applauds Westlands for beginning to find new ways to think about how to create wealth in their district. We also thank WWD for providing the opportunity to use an image from Gattaca, with Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman strolling in the solar farm.

The other Westlands collaboration is even more interesting - a project that crosses a spectrum from salt-laden drainage water to removing CO2 from the air. Not bad. From the High Country News:

New Sky Energy, a Boulder-based startup, has a plan to make money out of thin air. Using basic electrochemical technology and waste salts, New Sky aims to create compounds that suck carbon dioxide from the air.

The “carbonates” created can be used in making a variety of products, such as glass, resins and building materials.

“It is known chemistry we are using differently,” said New Sky’s founder and chief executive, Deane Little.

New Sky and the Westland Water District in Fresno, Calif., are set to announce a joint venture using the technology to build a $3.2 million pilot plant to turn salty drainage water into marketable products.

“We are the largest agricultural district in the country, and we are always looking at new technology because we have limited water resources,” said Sarah Woolf, a Westland Water District spokeswoman.

“This is one of the most promising and positive technologies we’ve seen,” she said.

After observing their behavior for a while now, one of the things one comes to sense about the folks in the WWD is that they are bold.

Sometimes, that boldness expresses itself as attempts to bully, with invites to Sean Hannity to come megaphone the District’s water woes on Fox News. 

Other times, the behavior expresses itself in anti-Endangered Species Act strategems, like hiring senators to change laws in ill-considered ways. This is the Bad Westlands.

The Good Westlands is the one that thinks laterally and creatively, not belligerently or anti-democratically. Their recent initiatives demonstrate that new and profitable spatial products can be reaped out of their abundant and abundantly toxic domain.

Let’s hope both initiatives are not too good to be true.