Surfing in the Desert Comes With a Climate Cost

(Bloomberg) -- Pickup trucks and SUVs pull into a parking lot, surfboards stashed in the back. Not an unusual sight in Southern California on a hot blue-sky morning in May, except this is the Coachella Valley, about 100 miles inland from the nearest beach. The would-be surfers trek over to an expanse of desert dirt surrounded by a verdant golf course and framed by the snow-capped San Jacinto mountains. Their surfboards are just props for a groundbreaking ceremony, but the spot is set to be submerged under nearly seven million gallons of water. The five-acre lagoon will generate artificial but ocean-like waves shaped by software. 

The $236 million project, called DSRT Surf, will also include a hotel, restaurants and private villas. It’s among dozens of similar surf parks either currently operating or under development around the world. Thanks to advances in computational fluid dynamics — the science of how water flows — and the rapidly declining cost of computing power, surfer-entrepreneurs have cracked the code on how to replicate the complex physics of breaking ocean waves. 

DSRT Surf is one of four surf parks that had been planned in recent years for this water-stressed stretch of the Sonoran Desert southeast of Los Angeles. Land-locked aspiring surfers can already pay upwards of $125 an hour to ride waves in the Swiss Alps, on former farmland in the UK, and next year, in Virginia Beach, Virginia, just blocks from an actual surf break. Some wealthy surfers are even building eight-figure wave pools on their estates. 

“You might ask, ‘All this great surf and this giant lagoon, is that irresponsible?’ ” Doug Sheres, a founding partner at Beach Street, DSRT Surf’s developer, says at the May groundbreaking in Palm Desert. “ ‘You’re putting all this water out there in the middle of the desert. Who would do something like that?’ ” 

“And the answer is, well, it’s really not as irresponsible as you might think.” 

Surf park proponents point out that the DSRT Surf lagoon is expected to use about 8% of the water of a typical 18-hole golf course in the Coachella Valley. And the resort will offset the wave pool’s annual 23.8 million gallon consumption of drinking water by replacing some of the surrounding golf course turf with drought-resistant landscaping. 

Still, generating tens of millions of freshwater waves around the world requires enormous amounts of water, electricity and carbon-intensive concrete, and as surf parks proliferate, so has scrutiny of their climate footprint. Minimizing energy and water impacts is not only an economic necessity to make projects profitable but a cultural one as wave pool operators seek to attract customers to a sport defined by its environmental ethos, even as they transform the joyful randomness of riding waves in the ocean into a more regimented and transactional experience.

“It’s the first time in history we can take the beach and plant it anywhere and push a button and there’s waves,” Aaron Trevis, founder of wave tech company Surf Lakes, says at the October Surf Park Summit, an industry conference held overlooking a surf beach in San Diego. “Waves will become a commodity.”

But it isn’t a commodification of nature everyone has welcomed. A judge in May issued an injunction against a proposed $106 million Oahu surf park after a Native Hawaiian group sued, alleging it would deplete drought-stressed local water supplies and damage the coastal environment. Some surfers question their purpose, too.

“​​In my mind, they’ll always be a poor facsimile of the ocean, a diminished Blade Runner-eque future,” says Chad Nelsen, chief executive of the climate and coastal advocacy group Surfrider Foundation. And as drought and other climate impacts intensify, so has the backlash. 

Best known for its eponymous music festival and affluent enclaves like Palm Springs, the Coachella Valley has long attracted well-heeled residents and second-home owners to its gated communities. As California imposed water rationing during the record-breaking 2020-2022 drought, developers sought approval for three wave pools in the Coachella Valley in addition to DSRT Surf. All four would consume as much as 138 million gallons of drinking water annually, according to environmental impact reports. 

One of them was the Thermal Beach Club, a gated compound of 326 luxury homes to be built around a 20-acre lagoon. Environmental justice activists opposed it. Surfing memberships at the beach club would start at $175,000 in a Latino community that had a median household income of $32,340 in 2022 and where some residents lack access to clean drinking water. County officials nonetheless approved the project in 2020. 

Four years later, the 118-acre building site remains dirt and desert scrub encircled by a chain-link fence. The developer, WhiteStar Development, didn’t respond to interview requests. Orion Corcilius, managing director at Vandever Capital, says that his Austin, Texas-based real estate investment banking firm is working on financing for the project. 

Seven miles away in La Quinta, world surf champion Kelly Slater’s wave park company had proposed building 600 homes and a hotel around a 16.6-acre wave pool, called the Coral Mountain resort. Town residents, many of whom live in golf communities dotted with artificial lakes, spoke out against it.

“This monstrosity and waste of water will only serve a small amount of folks who wish to surf in the desert,” one resident wrote to the city council, which rejected the project in September 2022.  

 “It’s easy to lose political support for surf parks if there’s a general public messaging that this is a silly idea and a waste of resources,” says Jess Ponting, the director of the Center for Surf Research at San Diego State University. 

 One of the four Coachella Valley projects, the Palm Springs Surf Club, though, sparked little controversy as it repurposed a defunct water park. It  opened in January 2024 and offers one-hour surf sessions for $212 to $265. 

 Palm Desert city officials say DSRT Surf’s water-offsetting initiative was key to securing the community’s blessing. And while DSRT Surf is projected to spike Palm Desert’s electricity demand by nearly 3%, a solar array will partially offset the increase. 

Also appealing is the prospect of attracting tourists to the desert in the sweltering summer months. “It will be a wonderful revenue generator,” Palm Desert Mayor Pro Tem Jan Harnik says. “I have five of my own kids and kids need healthy outdoor activities in the summer.”

The Wave in Bristol, England, has avoided community opposition by making itself the model of a greener surf park. It cut water consumption 35% since 2023 and The Wave’s 3-megawatt solar farm powers the entire former sheep-grazing site visited by 150,000 people annually. It’ll also save the company £400,000 ($507,000) this year. 

“It makes absolutely no sense to be creating brand new waves in an artificial environment to the detriment of natural waves and coral reefs,” says The Wave founder Nick Hounsfield.

The Wave and DSRT Surf use technology from Spanish startup Wavegarden; its electromechanical system can generate 400 to 500 big waves for 400 kilowatt/hour or less, according to the company.  “That’s less than a single chair lift at a ski resort,” says Seán Young, Wavegarden’s head of development. “That means the amount of installed power we need is low and it's actually quite feasible with a relatively small amount of solar.”  The technology has been deployed at nine surf parks around the world with another 10 under construction and 50 more in development.

URBN Surf, which runs two Wavegarden-powered surf parks in Australia, installed solar panels at its Sydney wave pool, and the facility also captures rain water. Its Melbourne park, adjacent to the airport, is powered by wind. The location underscores a less-than-sustainable statistic: About 30% of surf park surfers fly to get to a wave pool, according to a Surf Park Central survey. 

The parks’ lasting success relies on not just community acceptance but loyalty from lifelong surfers like Luke Wallace, who has surfed the URBN Surf Melbourne nearly 400 times since the wave pool opened in 2020. 

“I like the convenience of scheduling a surf around work and family and I can get 15 waves before work,” says Wallace. “While you obviously get a bit more variety in the ocean, you never know if you’re going to get waves.” 

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