Port St. Lucie is building a 4th water plant to avoid a 2030 shortage
The new Discovery Water Treatment Center in western PSL is a reverse-osmosis plant meant to head off a projected water shortage by 2030 as the city keeps booming.
All that explosive growth in Port St. Lucie comes with a less glamorous question: where does the water come from? The city's answer is a new plant.
PSL is moving forward with the Discovery Water Treatment Center, a reverse-osmosis facility along Discovery Way in the western part of the city. It'll be the city's fourth water plant.
The driver is a warning from the South Florida Water Management District, which flagged that Port St. Lucie won't be able to meet projected demand by 2030. The new plant starts at 10 million gallons a day with room to expand to 30 MGD, and full program costs have been reported around $200 million. Completion is expected by late 2029 or early 2030.
It's the kind of behind-the-scenes infrastructure nobody thinks about until the tap runs dry — and PSL is trying to make sure that never happens.
For a city that's added tens of thousands of residents in just a few years, building water capacity ahead of demand isn't optional. This is what keeping up with growth actually looks like.