Ed Ballard
speaker
163 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 30 Aug
Ed Ballard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You've already talked to Netafim, an Israeli water technology company, and desalination is a huge deal in the Middle East.
These areas just couldn't support the populations that they do without this technology.
There are 5,000 operational plants in the Middle East, and it's starting to be deployed further afield on the US West Coast.
And there's some really cool desalination technologies the journal had a
story last year about doing it underwater, in the ocean itself, to make the process more efficient.
And that sort of gets at the problem with desalination, which is it's pretty expensive.
If saving water is like at the easier end of this hierarchy of interventions, desalination is at the higher end.
It kind of raises interesting questions about the value of water because maybe it makes sense for that data center that we keep talking about to pay a higher price for water because you're running a desalination plant.
But again, if you're out in the sticks somewhere, you're working on a farm, there are fewer people around to collectively fund something like a desalination plant than there is in a town.
So again, you get into these interesting questions about how much is water worth and to whom?
And who is going to pay for things like those D cell plants?
Well, I think it's inevitable that we will see more investment in ensuring that water comes out of the taps and we have enough water to grow food.
But I think it's going to involve a lot of tough choices.
There are reasons why this has been a historically underfunded sector, just because it's quite difficult to generate a return from even some of the water projects that would be most useful.
You know, one of the useful interventions you can do to boost water security is uh something called sponge cities, you might have heard of, which basically means having more vegetation in a town or on a street to soak up more water.
And this can be a really effective way of preventing floods.
But it's hard to see how spending money on that actually generates a return for the private sector.
And this just shows up in in the numbers, especially in the developing world where some
Some of these problems are going to be most acute.
Only 2% of funding for water related projects in the developing world comes from the private sector.
Showing 61–80 of 163 · page 4 of 9
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