> Nevada is not a good candidate for a desalination plant.
No, but it's a good candidate for a solar power plant, and the water source is shared with major coastal metro areas. You'd of course want to move the power to the coast; an amount of water equivalent to that produced by desalination could be withheld upstream, in Nevada.
That said, I still think they made the right move building the 3rd intake, even at such expense. That intake is below the "dead pool" level, while the other 2 are not .. so even if ppl can't sort things out politically and continue to draw the water down past the point that it won't flow over the dam, NV will still be able to draw their "allotment". And of course, it's very hard to build desalination plants in CA, no matter how much sense it makes.