The multi year drought in California has many beginning to think of water the way we now think of energy—as not some inexpensive and abundant resource but one that requires management and dare I say, technological innovation.

California is itself dealing with a renewed interest in desalination, owing to its lengthy coastline and its long term dependence on sources like the Colorado River. In San Diego County, the largest ocean desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere is under construction with a $1 billion price tag. When finished in 2016, it will provide 50 million gallons of drinking water a day to the area, or about 7 percent of the county’s water usage.

In its third year of drought, fifteen desalination projects are currently in proposal stage along the California coast. But desalination is tricky. For starters it’s very energy intensive, owing to the need to send salt water through a fine membrane at high pressure. This makes the water expensive, an emerging concept in consumers’ minds, the idea that water can get pricy.

Desalination water typically costs about $2,000 an acre foot, which is about double that of water produced by building a new reservoir. The costs are also measured against conservation methods, like rebates for homeowners who will get rid of their lawns. The methods ultimately produce “new water” in a way that “negawatts” produce power by reducing demand. But unlike energy pricing, where fossil fuels remain somewhat predictable owing to decent visibility on production output of resources like coal and natural gas, water supply is highly volatile. And many desalination plants have been suddenly shut down once rains have come and cheaper water becomes abundant.

Additionally, building desalination plants have high capital costs, partially due to how difficult they are to get approved (The San Diego plant took six years and 14 lawsuits before construction finally began in 2012.) Environmentalists express concern over fish die-offs and want compromises like buried pipes and slower intake flow rates.

Still, desalination plants are viewed as a solution to growing water shortages. A new plant in Beijing will supply a whopping one third of the city’s water supply by 2019.

On the conservation side, many are asking whether it’s time to install smart water metering in parts of the U.S. The 2003 blackout helped spur Americans into embracing the need to upgrade the electrical grid and install smart meters. The current drought situation may well play a role in turning the tide on water metering.

San Francisco, where residents have been asked to reduce their water usage by as much as 20 percent, has quietly rolled out a program will put smart water meters in 180,000 homes and businesses. Customers will have online access to view their water usage.

Less than 10 percent of California has smart water metering and there are still a very small number of homes and businesses that don’t even have any type of meter (they play a flat fee for water).

At some point the droughts plaguing California will break. But there’s likely a market opportunity as the heightened awareness has utilities and commissioners looking at better water management systems, be it smart water meters or desalination plants as a way to move toward water independence.

We’re likely to see some creative thinking here (one idea is to locate desalination plants next to data centers so that the cold ocean water cools data centers, leaves data centers warmer and is delivered at an more optimal temperature to desalination plants). And as long as the drought goes one, everyone is likely to be receptive to new ideas.