As we slide inexorably into the clutches of Soviet-style cultural narrative control and thought prevention courtesy of ‘fact-checking’ institutions and their oddly subjective ‘fact books’, I offer the following conundrum as a hurled wrench into the cogs of the greasy gears of the thought police:
Solar power could soon become a wonderful thing for humanity.
As a heretical writer on an oil/gas centric website – most likely soon to be flagged by governmental decree and definition a writhing pit of misinformation or disinformation (take your pick – bill C-11 & spawn won’t split hairs) – yes, I offer a ringing endorsement for solar power.
Not as a blanket solution of course; I may be heretical but I’m not insane. And not as an olive branch to those that think solar can become some kind of backbone of the electrical system. The enthusiasm herein for solar is in reference to the technology as a potential building block for a whole other aspect of civilization that is more desperately needed by a factor of ten than the current collective spastic heave that is our war on carbon emissions.
Solar power may prove to be an excellent solution to one of the world’s most considerable problems: a lack of potable water.
Water desalination from the sun is not exactly new technology, it likely has been around longer than the world’s oldest profession. (Hard to pin that point in history exactly but hey it gives context that perks up the ears of most people. Suffice it to say that solar distillation has been around for thousands of years.)
My inbox, spanning email and social media (looking at you Twitter) seems to be filled with one of two things these days – some modern form of prostitution (aw, look who started following me…wait a minute, is it necessary to show everyone that…) or something to do with renewable energy as a solution to emissions. Both have mastered the art of PR, both make shocking claims, both promise a good time for next to nothing, and both are going to get you in trouble.
However, out of that morass did actually appear some eye-catching information (not the porn – it might be an eyeful but it’s not information). A Saudi Arabian firm named Acwa Power is one of the many that peppers me with news releases, and one of them somehow stood out in the flow: Acwa Power announced the Hassyan sea water desalination plant that will use solar power to produce 180 million gallons of desalinated water, per day.
Big wild numbers are difficult to contextualize on their own, so here’s a visual: an Olympic sized swimming pool, 165 feet long and 56 feet wide, holds just under 500,000 US gallons. This Acwa Power project could fill 360 of them, every day.
Of even more significance is that the price of such desalination has been tumbling. In 1970, the cost for reverse osmosis desalinated water was about $5 per cubic meter. By 2005, the cost had fallen to about $1/m3. The Acwa Power project pegs the cost at $0.37. My recent City of Calgary water bill shows a water cost of $1.42/m3 which is about $1.03 US, or triple the price that Acwa is supplying water at.
Consider that falling cost structure along with Acwa’s total desalination capacity. The company can now produce 7.6 million cubic meters per day, or two billion gallons – enough to fill 4,000 Olympic size swimming pools, every day.
This is pretty fantastic news for humanity. It’s true that vast solar fields aren’t exactly environmentally friendly, but given that many regions short of water have vast tracts of marginally useful land (fly over much of the southwestern US and look out the window, for example) that might be a fantastic home for solar power if the trade off is to fill a bunch of swimming pools every day, or, who knows, maybe even grow some vegetables or irrigate some trees.
Imagine if in future vast pipelines are built from coastal areas inland, carrying enough water for cities in desperate need, all at low cost. Maybe the pipelines bring sea water inland for desalination, where vast stretches of nearly empty land could be utilized for solar desalination.
Solar could be utilized exactly as it works best – by providing a service not tied to the persistent timing demands of customers. Other fuels couldn’t touch it, assuming Acwa’s economics are sound elsewhere.
Such is the path forward for the ‘energy transition’; that is how we are going to make actual progress in utilization of renewable energy. In fact, the term ‘energy transition’ should probably be junked, because it has become so loaded and politicized that it is like a rusted out junk-heap smoking down the freeway.
We aren’t really transitioning away from any particular form of energy; several centuries after coal appeared as a major industrial fuel, the world now continues to set annual consumption records for the stuff. Same as oil. Same as natural gas.
You don’t have to be serious student, only half-interested will suffice, in energy history to quickly grasp the reason for the rise of coal, and what that cheap/easy fuel allowed humans to accomplish; to quickly grasp the significance of oil, and what it allowed humans to do; to quickly grasp the significance of natural gas as some sort of miraculous heating fuel that allowed mass settlement in very cold regions, that allowed manufacture of countless things…and on and on. Maybe solar power has found its niche where it can be of vast benefit to humanity.
In a nutshell, that’s the story of energy – the obvious massive potential of new developments that move humanity forward not in tiny steps but in large strides. But those strides don’t come about by abolishing the existing systems, unless the new technology is so vitally advanced that it renders obsolete any demand for the previous. Notice the nuance there; a transition happens by a draw to the new, not an abolition of the existing. The adoption of automobiles didn’t require the execution of horses.
Despite the airplay given to opponents in the media, there is no grand villainy in the energy world. The fact that every single person relies on hydrocarbons to the extent they do (which is fully and completely) is quite clearly the consequence of the utility of those fuels over time, not a nefarious scheme for world dominance by producers. In fact, if any technology could have supplanted large quantities of hydrocarbons, it would have been nuclear power – but many of the most fanatical anti-nuclear people are also anti-hydrocarbons (Greenpeace, for example), while I know very few oilpatch people that campaign against nuclear.
Every single consumer would prefer to have cheaper, cleaner energy, but not at the expense of reliability. No threat is more instinctually horrifying than the thought of running out of fuel when we need it most. Elements of the WEF crowd are even acknowledging this; Bill Gates recently pointed out that “If you try to do climate brute force, you will get people who say, ‘I like climate but I don’t want to bear that cost and reduce my standard of living.’ “ And that’s here in the west; in the developing world, the conversation is far more abrupt than that.
Any ‘energy transition’ has to be built around those cold hard realities. Governments need to stop trying to quash certain industries just because they’ve been led to believe that doing so is the path forward. It isn’t.
You might wonder whether this animosity towards hydrocarbons is more imagined than real. Consider this: Covering Climate Now is an affiliation of over 500 news outlets, organizations, professional howlers, and every group of rag-tag semi-employable grad students that has come together under the climate banner. The organization includes such media pillars as Reuters and Newsweek.
On their Projects page is a project called: Climate crimes – investigating “big oil’s complicity in the climate crisis and attempts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable.”
Hmm. Ignoring the incredible mental deficiencies and dexterities required to refrain from cataloguing the benefits brought to humanity by hydrocarbons (that is, almost all of them), one has to wonder why they aren’t going after “Big Coal”. Is it because the developing world would, if in a good mood, throw them out on their ear?
We remain silent on this bullsh*t at our peril. Not just as an industry – the antics of these clowns will only make reserves more valuable when demand is obviously so high – but as humanity. It is the less well off, the non-Tesla drivers, that will take it on the chin when our existing hydrocarbon supply chain is pummeled into oblivion.
Please contrast their witch hunt with the fact that there is no issue with speaking on an oil and gas-centric website of the benefits of solar (and hydrogen, and nuclear, etc.) because those things aren’t the competition most make it out to be. Seven billion people are striving to live like the other billion, and the foundation upon which they will make progress is affordable, reliable energy.
Add in the west’s newfound fascination with AI, and data centers, and air conditioners, among many other power-sucking accoutrements, and it is clear that we need all forms of energy, in as much quantity as we can provide.
It is safe to take this idea one step further. Consider that the oil patch has a waste water problem; many oilfields have high water cuts, and that impure water incurs costs to transport and dispose. What if solar power could be harnessed to distill much of that waste water – the process could provide very valuable new potable water sources in the parched prairies, could lower transportation and disposal costs of waste water, and could reduce emissions associated with transportation, processing and disposal of all that waste water.
I would bet that the oil patch would wholeheartedly embrace the concept of utilizing solar energy long before the Guilbeaults of the world could embrace the value of natural gas and harness it to full potential.
It should be up to the wisdom of our leaders to remember the miracles of the division of labour, and apply it to energy. Not everyone in a village should be a boot maker; not every country should try to be master of all industries; and some forms of energy will work wonders in one area but not in another. Solar power is a decent supplement to a power grid, up to a very limited point, but might be a game-changer in the field of desalination. Find the best use for each niche. EVs might be fantastic city delivery vehicles/cabs/etc. but might never work in the cold rural heartland. So what? It’s not an issue at all, except that governments are having a phenomenally difficult time accepting the reality that blanket climate initiatives are doomed to fail, in a very painful way.
Sooner or later we will start coming to our senses policy-wise, but there are going to have to be some wake-up calls along the way before we get there.
Energy conversations should be positive and, most of all, grounded in reality. Life depends on it. Find out more in “The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity” at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com. Thanks!
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here, or email Terry here.
###
Addendum from Charles.
Wind Power is also a potentially excellent means to operate a desalination plant, especially when one avoids electrical generation altogether with: Direct-Driven Wind Powered Desalination: Mechanical-Hydraulic Systems
From: Integration of Wind Energy and Desalination Systems: A Review Study
6. Direct-Driven Wind Powered Desalination: Mechanical-Hydraulic Systems
All the systems presented before consider electricity as the intermediate energy medium: the mechanical energy of a turbine is converted into electrical energy, which is then used to power the equipment needed for the desalination process. To reduce the intermediate energy losses, the electrical conversion step can be avoided. This is the case of stand-alone systems where the wind turbine is mechanically and hydraulically connected to the RO system.
This means that the generator and the electronic components are eliminated. In their place, the rotor is mechanically connected to the shaft of the pump or compressor that drive the desalination process. The pump and compressor can be placed at the bottom of the tower or at the ground level, so that a system of gearboxes, pistons and belt transmission system is used for transmitting the motion [77,78,79,80]. Another possibility is to locate the compressor and the pump directly in the nacelle [81,82,83]. In these cases, the fluid is pressurised directly there, and act as a energy transfer medium. A description of several type of rotor-pump connections in wind turbines with hydraulic transmission system was presented in Chen et al. [84].
The use of a mechanic/hydraulic transmission system bring several advantages. In particular, good performances, robustness and reliability, that are particularly attractive for remote area applications [77,85,86]. In addition, the elimination on the generator leads to a noticeable reduction of weight in the nacelle. An overview of the prototype and conceptual design of wind-driven desalination systems with mechanic and hydraulic connection is presented in the following subsection, and summarised in Table 5.
Table 5. Stand alone with direct mechanic–hydraulic connection.
6.1. With Intermediate Energy Storage
One of the first prototypes of directly connected wind-driven desalination systems was developed and tested for groundwater desalination in 1988 [77]. There, an Aermotor fan-blade windmill extracted water from a well. In such a wind pump, the rotational motion of the rotor is converted by a geared mechanism to an up and down motion, that drives a pump rod inside the well.
In this way, water was pumped up the pipe at each upstroke and was delivered to pressure tanks at a pressure of 600–1100 kPa. The pressure vessels had the role of hydraulic accumulator, as energy storage. A solenoid valve allowed the flow of pressurised water from the pressure vessels to the membranes for the desalination process when a pre-set pressure level was reached. A simple schematic of the system is presented in Figure 5.
Figure 5. Schematics of the pilot project described in [77].
The prototype was operational for 13 months, and the data collected during operations proved the effectiveness of such a system, even though the pressure losses of the system amounted up to 52%, and the recovery rate achieved values of 9–9.7%: that was very close to the target value of 10%, but still lower than conventional desalination systems.
The plant resulted to be economically feasible if compared with conventional water production technologies when the capacity is 500 L/d or more, but not convenient when water carting is possible at a distance below 30–40 km. To increase the efficiency and reduce the energy losses associated with the brine stream (over 90% at 10% recovery rate), the use of an energy recovery device was suggested. Furthermore, a self regulation and system control is absolutely needed, and a diesel generator or gasoline pump is necessary to cover for always guaranteeing potable water.
A similar prototype was built and tested in Coconut Island, Hawaii [78], see Figure 6. Again, a multivane wind pump was used to pressurised brackish water, that was stored in a hydro pneumatic flow-pressure stabiliser. However, in this case not one but a series of solenoid valves are used to regulate the flow to the desalination unit, opening and closing sequentially in correspondence of different pressure levels reached in the hydro-pneumatic storage. In this way, the operating water pressure is kept approximately constant, regardless of the wind speeds.
Figure 6. Schematics of the pilot project described in [78].
In the execution of the project [79], the ability to create different pressure levels was used for including water pre-treatment in the system. In the first stage of operation, the water pressure was pretreated. In the second stage, the pretreated water was pressurised further for RO desalination. Furthermore, a modification of the prototype was implemented to let the system work also at different feed water salinities: several RO unit as put in parallel, each one able to work for a specific range of feed water salinity.
The control system measured the concentration of the feed water and then sends the pretreated water to the corresponding reverse osmosis pressure vessel. The prototype was then successfully managing varying wind speed and feed water concentrations. However, both cases discussed above are only suitable for brackish water desalination, since the wind pump system is not able to rise the pressure to the level required for seawater desalination.
A pressure accumulator was presented in WindDeSalter technology [82]. In WindDeSalter technology, the desalination plant is directly connected to the wind turbine, and completely integrated within the wind turbine tower. Two different configurations are possible, either integration with RO desalination or with MVC, as shown in Figure 7. In both cases, seawater is pre-filtrated and stored in a built-in tank on the bottom of the tower. From there, the prefiltrated seawater is pumped up for being desalinated.
Figure 7. Schematics of the pilot project described in [82]: on the left, the version with reverse osmosis as desalination technology; on the right, the one with mechanical vapour compression.
In the case of RO desalination, water is pumped up to the nacelle, where pumps connected to the rotor via a gearbox pressurise it and send it to the pressure accumulator and to the RO units, located on the tower just below the nacelle. The pressure accumulator smoothen the pressure fluctuations and the peak loads, while a control device regulate the pressurised volume flow of sea water via a flow control valve, and the power produced by the wind turbine via the blade pitch mechanism. Furthermore, several pumps and RO desalination unit can be activated or deactivated depending on the available wind power.
In the case of MVC desalination, the pre-filtrated seawater is first pre-heated, and then it is pumped to the evapourator/condenser located in the top of the tower. In this case, the compressor of the MVC system is directly connected to the rotor of the wind turbine. Then, the freshwater and the brine produced are handled as in the RO desalination configuration. The authors concluded that such a system is feasible and cost competitive compared with conventional technologies.
An innovative hydro-pneumatic energy storage system was integrated in a floating offshore wind-driven seawater desalination system in Cutajar et al. [81], in Figure 8. In this case study, a floating offshore wind turbine supported by a tension leg platform is directly used for pressurising seawater. The rotational motion of the rotor is converted in linear motion by a swash plate piston pump, replacing the generator in the nacelle.
Figure 8. Schematics of the pilot project described in [81].
The pressurised seawater is then accumulated into the submersed chamber, located into the gravity foundation of the tension leg platforms and anchored to the seabed, of a two chamber hydro-pneumatic storage. The air with which both chambers are pre-filled is then pushed trough the umbilical into the other, floating chamber and compressed. This way the system is charging and the energy is stored. When there is not enough wind, instead, the air in the floating chamber is allowed to expand, pushing seawater out at high pressure.
The pressurised seawater is then directed to the reverse osmosis module, located on the platform, and is desalinated. The freshwater obtained can be pumped to the shore by a booster pump, while the brine is recirculated in a PX ERD exchanger. The residual energy in the brine is transmitted to part of the pre-treated water that is stored in the liquid piston chamber, while the exhausted brine is discharged into the open sea.
The paper provides a mathematical and computational model to simulate the system and analyse two flow control schemes. The first one acts to maintain a constant pressure to the feed flow to the RO membranes, while the second one aims at maintaining a constant flow rate. Both schemes prevent the emptying or the overfilling of the lower chamber. Results from the simulation show that the proposed configuration and control schemes provide a good smoothing of the fluctuations, being able to produce 33,000 m33/d with a 5 MW wind turbine and 6.5 MWh hydro-penumatic storage.
6.2. Without Energy Storage but Direct Connection
However, energy storage systems increase the initial cost and the weight and volume of the wind-driven desalination plant. There is no energy storage in the small prototype described by Heijman et al. [80], in Figure 9. The rotor of the multivane wind turbine is directly connected to the shaft of the high pressure pump of the SWRO desalination unit at ground level, by means of a bevel gear, a vertical shaft and a belt drive.
Figure 9. Schematics of the pilot project described in [80].
The motor of the energy recovery device is mounted on the same shaft of the high pressure pump, therefore they always have the same rotational speed. Due to the direct mechanical connection of the wind turbine and the pump and the absence of any intermediate storage device, the pump speed, and so the permeate production, varies with wind. In this way, the recovery rate can be maintained fixed without the need of any extra regulators ad controls. Dealing with variable process conditions, the prototype was able to achieve a maximum recovery of 25% (compared with 40–50% of typical value for seawater desalination in commercial systems) and a variable permeate flow. The system includes a tank for storing freshwater to cover for the period of wind unavailability.
The high pressure pump replacing the generator is located in the nacelle and directly connected to the wind turbine rotor in the prototype described in Greco et al. [83], see Figure 10. Pre-filtrated seawater is pressurised in the nacelle and delivered partly to a SWRO desalination module for freshwater production and partly to a Pelton turbine generator for electricity production.
Figure 10. Schematics of the pilot project described in [83].
An isobaric energy recovery device (iSave) is used to recover energy from the brine, pressurising part of the seawater. This portion of seawater is then deducted from the water that is processed by the high pressure pump. The prototype, that is mainly composed of on-shelf components, is designed for a rated desalination capacity of 600 m33/d of produced water. Given the direct connection between the wind turbine rotor and of the high pressure pump, the flow rate and the pressure of the stream provided by the latter vary depending on the wind speed.
Therefore, an operational strategy is proposed to let the system operate within the limits imposed by each component, maximising freshwater and electricity production. The operational strategy is based on the active control of the collective blade-pitch mechanism, on the opening position of the spear valve of the Pelton turbine, and on the flow rates handled by the ERD.
Finally, a new concept of floating wind turbine, the Wind Energy Marine Unit WEMU, is employed for desalinating seawater in [87,88]. A WEMU is a wind turbine with vertical axis, around which rotates a semi-subermgible rotating pontoon, as a sort of vertical blades structure. A WEMU is provided of a a hydraulic transmission system, consisting of hydrostatic water pumps directly connected to the rotor, and high head water turbines for the production of electricity.
For its application for seawater desalination, two different configurations are proposed, as represented in Figure 11. In [87], the WEMU is used for Multi Stage Flash distillation (MSF) desalination. The water pumped by the hydraulic transmission system of the WEMU is partly used for electricity production via a hydraulic head turbine generator. The electricity generated is used for heating the remaining pressurised seawater, which is than distilled in the MSF plant.
Figure 11. Schematics of the pilot project described in [87] (on the left) and on [88], on the right.
Heat can be recycled from the brine and the permeate by pre-heating the feed seawater through heat exchangers. In [88], instead, the water pressurised by the hydraulic transmission system is directed to an RO module and desalinated. The permeate is then set to the shore. Even in this case energy is recovered, by processing the high pressure brine through a high-head hydraulic turbine generator, producing electricity. According to the authors such a system is the most promising for partially solving the water lack problem in Northern Crimea, with the additional advantage of providing also electrical energy.
While the conventional electrical drive transmission system is well diffused and predominant for wind turbines, the use of hydraulic or mechanical drive transmission systems in wind energy is still in the development phase and covers a niche market. The lower diffusion is therefore reflected in the limited number of prototypes and studies on directly connected wind drive desalination systems. The few pilot tested or proposed have a wide range of wind power capacity (from below 1 kW to 8 MW) and water production capacity (from below 1 m33/d up to 864,000 m33/d), have different layout configurations and wind turbine shapes.
However, there is a clear predominance of the reverse osmosis as desalination technology. It is also interesting to notice that the majorities of the most recent prototypes or case studies are intended for offshore applications, rather than onshore. From the tests and simulations presented it is seen that there are several operational strategy that can be adopted to successfully cope with the fluctuations of wind energy and, once the technologies will develop further, the results may be promising and competitive with respect to conventional systems.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Also good to fight increasing sealevel. 😀
How about solar/wind powered firefighting high pressure hoses to suck up sea water at the Antarctic coast and spray it to the interior? Oops I’d better shut up or the eco-nazis will think it’s a serious idea…
That would only be a temporary solution. The increased weight of ice would cause the glaciers to speed up, resulting in increased calving.
salt water doesn’t freeze as easily as fresh … might work a bit
Seawater freezes only 4°F lower than fresh water, so not a problem. Of course, sea level rise isn’t really a problem, either, so there are better ways for the governments to waste our tax dollars.
Which does deal with storage of electricity being vastly expensive. Fresh water is readily storable.
And they could use heat engines instead of solar panels – about 40% versus 25% efficient with current tech but could be pushed to 60% maybe (like CCGTs) but solar has a 30% limit if the theory is right.
Or line the sea shore with those topical radiative panels (that cool to a couple of degrees below ambient despite 15 degree claims) to condense distilled water from the boiling oceans. Better yet, paint the seashore with the radiative paint….
No, I like the idea of the solar panel shades. I’m sure they could sucker a carbon credit firm or idiot green government or NGO to subsidize the project “to save our planet” and end up with lots shady carports for all the sheikhs’ Lambos.
I was thinking of those early condensed solar setups that had a reflective half pipe attached to a pipe carrying water or helium – the sun would heat the pipe directly.
The big solar concentrators with a the mirrors arranged pointing to a top of a tower look cool, failed in California, but the ACWA company has made it’s own.
Old info: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-investment-mideast-acwa-power-idUSKCN0IB1Y420141022
Looks like the project has changed owners or names:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noor_Abu_Dhabi_Solar_Power_plant
I’m an engineering geek so I hope it works for it’s owner, but I know it’s a special case in a special place.
“Which does deal with storage of electricity being vastly expensive. Fresh water is readily storable.”
Yes. It also follows the principle of using low-grade energy to do low-grade work.
The cheapest way (energetically) to dry your laundry is to hang it outside on a day which is windy and not freezing or pouring rain. The main cost is the ‘engineering’ of the washing line and the effort made to peg the laundry out and collect it.
The windmills in the Netherlands were used for pumping water out of the low-lying lands back up to sea level. It really doesn’t matter if they go MIA for a couple of weeks, the long term effect is still the same.
“given that many regions short of water have vast tracts of marginally useful land (fly over much of the southwestern US and look out the window, for example) that might be a fantastic home for solar power “
To desalinate water one must have an abundant source of salty water. Where is this source in southwestern US? What are they going to desalinate?
I believe that situation was explained by having pipes and pumps installed at the coast and pumping the water to the plants in the SW. Of course you could put the desalination plants at the coast and DC wire the juice from the SW solar farms then pump the fresh water back. Though solar still only produces power at near nameplate for 4 hours daily. So the desalination plants would only be able to operate from 10am until 2pm.
A good coastal nuclear facility would allow for desalination 24/7
They could augment the solar with wind, and if they drag the salt water to the desert, the left over brine could be left in the open to evaporate (maybe to improve the local conditions weather-wise) and the remaining ‘waste’ could be mined for various metals.
I doubt it would be cost effective but it’s like those economics-challenged physicists straying out of their knowledge zone to make comments like “all the uranium we need could be distilled from sea water” or the nuclear or fusion power will “be too cheap to meter”.
That said, if some region is really desperate for the water, and salt water processing makes sense, then they could get a bonus mining industry out of it.
Now, realistically speaking, there is not only a viable use for solar pv but likely the Best use for the technology. Turning the light from my desk lamp into energy to power my desktop calculator without batteries.
The cost of dragging salt water to the desert would increase the cast of potable water significantly. If there was a way to economically pull seawater to deserts, we could create artificial salt lakes that would improve local climates and could be very productive ecosystems. This would be the opposite of killing the Aral Sea. So, why is nobody doing this? Probably the cost of dragging the water.
The Salton Sea and Death Valley are below sea level. Once a pipeline is built you would only have to pay to pump it out once and then it would run on it’s own – forever if you set the flow equal to how much evaporates.
Like siphoning a tank.
But obviously, pipelines aren’t free and the environmentalists will certainly block it, as they care more to keep things as they are than to make that desert environment better for life, and make some money while doing it.
Siphons have a 34 foot elevation limit.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26628323/
There is actually a patent on a cascade siphon system that removes any elevation limit. I’m still trying to figure out if it would really work.
US Patent No. 2,855,860, Lloyd R. Crump, Silver Spring, Md. Inventor, Patented October 14, 1958.
People
Here’s a thought.
California (I think mainly LA?) gets a lot of water from the Colorado River and those dryer states east of the Rocky Mountains.
California can stop doing that and build these plants instead.
Regarding abundant source of salty water. The gulf of California is around 100 miles from the US /Mexican border give or take. Meaning around the El Centro, CA area.
Biden and Lopez Obrador (amlo) I am sure can work something out with the cartels to protect the pipeline – and Biden can make construction happen by printing up a bunch more money.
And how/where do we dispose of all the nasty chemicals as the byproduct of desalination?
Assuming they came from the sea, put them back? But on second thoughts Green Peas would object to that.
Sell it, the minerals are worth money!
G’Day PCman999,
“…the minerals are worth money.”
Even on a small scale. Had a friend at Tecopa Hot Springs, CA. Ran some of his well water into galvanized buckets and let it evaporate. Sold bottles of the salts, “Use in the bath tub as you would epson salts.” He didn’t get rich, but had a pretty loyal clientele.
If he can do that at a small scale and just for bath salts, imagine what a proper business mining very popular lithium could do.
Sea salt is not nasty and is valuable. They actually use direct sunlight to just do this – evaporate water in shallow pools to obtain the sea salt.
Good question.
There are valuable and/or useful minerals in it. (Water dissolves a little bit of just about everything.)
It might be cost effective to recover them from the waste brine?
Maybe solar power has found its niche where it can be of vast benefit to humanity.
It always has been beneficial for bore pumps for stock (displaced windmill pumps) and desalination to add to existing water supplies. But household rooftop solar is also economic for heating water and airconditioning the home as the most economic storage devices-
Energy Efficient | Power Diverter Australia Pty Ltd | Australia
It can do the same for swimming pools with filtration pumping and storing heat. Just don’t let unreliables dump on the communal grid.
You forgot garden lanterns and annoying speeding signs, no need to run expensive power lines.
“The enthusiasm herein for solar is in reference to the technology as a potential building block for a whole other aspect of civilization that is more desperately needed by a factor of ten”
talk about missing the point entirely. to do so would be like handing a child a machine gun. or so i’ve been told.
huh? elaborate please?
the malthusians have been in control for quite some time. there’s a reason they are going after farmers and fertilizer. there’s a reason they go after ranchers and methane. there’s a reason we can’t seem to build new reservoirs. there’s a reason why new nuclear plants cost 17 billion per 1000 megawatt, but old ones had cost 2 billion per 1000 megawatt, inflation adjusted.
Solar can be many things other than a reliable grid supplier. They now sell A/C units that need only be plugged into panels. No charge controller, no batteries, no inverter. Why doesn’t a 60% solution appeal to them?
They’ve been taught the world won’t be “saved” until the human population is less than 1 billion.
A logical application like water desalinization is a step backward to them.
Malthusians are misanthropes – hate their own species, and I would say ought to be committed in a padded room for their own safety and ours!
“”Solar power has massive potential to benefit humanity””
Sunlight across the globe is not evenly distributed and this is climate justice demand #1. / sarc
No shortage of solar-powered desalinated water here. Where’s my umbrella and galoshes?
The claim by ACWA is for $0.37 per m³ and best I see is that it takes 3kWh of electrickery to produce 1m³ of desaltinated water,
sooooo, they are claiming they can make/buy solar PV at $0.12 per kWh
Is that sensible/reasonable/possible?
Even before you get into the claimed vs actual efficiencies of RO plants – as attached
It’s worse than that – as the 37¢ per m3 includes the cost of the plant too and labour.
Solar is cheap if you don’t need any transmission lines or batteries or to buy power from other sources when it’s dark or cloudy.
That’s my use of solar power:
Solar artificial pond filter, runs well
Probably made possible by unregulated application. If it’s for humans instead of pond carp, then the price increases.
Great point!
Thanks Terry and Charles, very encouraging technology. I must have missed the method for the solar system; was it direct solar heating or through solar to electricity for the de sal?
Think about how much water could be desalinated by a nuclear reactor!
The point is that energy sources that are useful for grid power need to be on the grid. Using solar for loads that don’t require reliable power on demand frees up nuclear and other reliables for increasing reliability and lowering the price of grid power.
I think desalinization might be built into the with cooling water system so a more complicated design would serve both uses.
Nuclear power, wherever desalination is taking place there will be a grid. Your point is moot. Desalination on any body of water will result in a city with agriculture built around it. More electricity will be needed.
If you argue that water will be pumped elsewhere, wind and solar do not have the energy required for such a massive task.
Using the most expensive inefficient energy anywhere for anything is foolish
Especially at night or on the weekends when there is less electrical demand. Nuclear is mostly fixed costs.
…so it doesn’t make it substantially cheaper to run if they turn down the power on the reactor – most of the cost is still there.
Maybe that’s why UAE went nuclear in a big way, they can desalinate water and store it in reservoirs whenever there is surplus electricity.
The point is not how much water can be produced, but how efficiently can it be produced.
Running a nuclear power plant just to desalinate water sounds like over kill to me.
If the reactor is there anyway – like the multi-plant unit in UAE, and it’s in the middle of the night and there is low demand (cold at night in the desert), than why not do something useful with that surplus power.
One is not going to save anything significant by turning down the power of the reactor. It’s a big, slow headache.
🙂
Damn. I hate these ‘why didn’t I think of that’ moments. A tank of water makes a damn fine, cheap buffer for solar power in this case.
One wonders about the economics of a desalination plant for London which only used renewable power off the grid at times when they are practically paying you to take it away…
Wouldn’t London get it’s water from the river or wells? UK is constantly getting rained on, so no need to use salt water.
Most of these “salt water to drinking water” back-of-the-envelop dreams are only applicable to arid and usually undeveloped areas and have no application in the west were proper potable water production has been handled effectively since at least the time of the Romans.
The comment from “hdhoese” below just rendered my comment into shreads – apparently desalination seems to be a possible solution for coastal Texas instead of piping it in from somewhere else.
I stand corrected.
London does not need desalinated water, it has enough natural freshwater.
Actually rainfall in London is low. The city and much of the south is often subject to water use restrictions: ‘hosepipe bans’. In addition, much of London’s water supply is recycled: apocryphally water goes through 20 Londoners on its way to the sea.
While I don’t know in detail which pieces of infrastructure are deficient, the above at least suggests that additional water supply would ‘t hurt. If the power was all-but-free because renewables were producing too much, it could be interesting.
I think this article goes to show that many of us aren’t against wind or solar on principle. There are good uses of both. Someday I’d like to slap some solar panels on my roof, assuming the cost of ownership doesn’t spike after 5 years. Solar is fine; wind is fine. Dumping all of a nation’s “eggs” into those baskets as the source of electricity– stupid.
I’m fine with wind and solar for anything that doesn’t rely on the intermittency of wind and solar
Wind generators ruin landscapes, kill birds, disturb whales, they are very short lived, very difficult to dismantle and recycle. They hardly pay for themselves over their lifetime. They do not solve any real problem, only imaginary ones, and create real problems. They are an expense to society which we all pay in the form of inflation. Much of the same can be said about solar.
Agreed, Someone. I think windmills are a blight on the landscape, too. I live in a state that can’t seem to stop funneling money to destroying our landscape. And it’s a republican-run state, too.
The central Texas coast, which is at the coastal mid-point where average evaporation exceeds precipitation and runoff, water needs are colliding with industrialization and development. Drier to the south, wetter to the northeast with a lot of variability. Currently in a drought, hopefully not a precursor of the 50s, has raised bay salinities and brought the water shortage to the desalinization proposed solution. There is a plan for the old oil port at Harbor Island by the main shipping inlet (Aransas Pass) for Corpus Christi which is also true for the central coast fish and shrimp larval bay immigration and ultimate emigration.
There is ample evidence from the petroleum reserve in salt domes that this highly saline produced water can be rapidly dissipated in the Gulf of Mexico but that greatly increases the cost.The effect of putting it in the inlet is more uncertain about the cheaper version putting it in the inlet because the astronomical tide is often overcome by the wind, very difficult to, as they say, model. Seasonal variation in sea level is greater than daily tides without the wind.This is similar to the windmill problem where a lot of the central coast has become covered by them and somebody pointed out that they don’t produce electricity when the wind don’t blow. This is also another example of the collision of climate imperatives as Corpus is one the central ports for energy real as in hydrocarbons and imagined as in proposed hydrogen.
The old idea of “the solution to pollution is dilution” comes to mind.
There may be a requirement that the waste water from these plants to be piped far enough out to sea that it doesn’t seriously impact salinity levels.
The CCS champions could pipe CO2 emissions out to the deep cold ocean, low in absorbed CO2, but the eco-nazis won’t allow them to think that way.
CO2 is plant food anyway.
Just at random for those who like big numbers (personally I hold No truck with swimming pools)
If Saudi Arabia was returned to being the semi-tropical rainforest it was, (‘ve said how to do that plenty of times) – it would create its own rain.
As a farmer in Cumbria, NW England, part of my job was to look after 100Ha of ground by ‘escorting’ One Million Tonnes of rainwater off the premises every year.
As rainforests go,that would be a fairly modest amount
If Saudi Arabia did become a rainforest again and it rained as hard as it does in Cumbria, the residents of SA would be having to deal with 5.5 Billion Tonnes of rainwater per day
Without installing a single solar panel at all.
“If Saudi Arabia did become a rainforest again”
Work on that part first.
Making drinkable water out of bad water via sunlight was part of survival training during my time in Navy.
Drinking water is a huge benefit to poor villagers. Good use of sun’power.
Speculation, but what if “pumped hydro” could be reconfigured to pump salt water up coastal California mountains when power is cheap, then let return energy generated flowing inland for peak times. Plenty of solar nearby to desalinate, as water flows down to refill the Salton Sea and perhaps Death Valley. Evaporation cools the area and maybe Arizona too. Discussed in”Pumped Hydro to Replenish the Salton Sea and Bring Death Valley to Life: https://economicthinking.org/pumped-hydro-to-replenish-the-salton-sea-and-bring-death-valley-to-life/. More on Seaflooding (but without the pumped hydro angle) https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/seaflooding
Would environmentalists allow you to bring the desert back to life? Might bother a rattlesnake or 2 if one made Death Valley hospitable to life. Seriously they would block this, they aren’t a friend to life in general.
Salt brine is heavy.
and corrosive.
“The adoption of automobiles didn’t require the execution of horses. ”
Excellent point!
Probably the scariest thing about the climate cult is that they are actively pushing to curtail and eliminate the fossil fuel infrastructure before the solar/wind one is anywhere near ready to take over. It’s like they are the useful idiots for the ruinable energy lobby, being used to remove competition and drive up prices and panic to make their con game pay off.
Solar/wind WILL NEVER BE READY TO TAKE OVER. That’s the reality denied by ‘climate’ zealots.
You can’t replace 24/7 electric generation with “at the whim of the sunshine and breezes” generation.
And you can’t build worse-than-useless solar panels, windmills, or battery powered limited range autos without all of the energy inputs coming from fossil fuels anyway.
There is not, and will never be, an “energy transition.” The alleged, but actually impossible, “transition” is the BIG LIE they keep telling.
A bit of a problem, Terry, is that if you use Acwa cost estimating methodology, your City of Calgary water would be nearly ZERO cost because it is collected from the Bow River for close to free. It is likely that Acwa’s stated costs are incorrect by about an order of magnitude to rouse the “paid study” business.
Acwa’s stated costs are “pie-in-the-sky” . . . see my post below.
ACWA – oh gees just got it “aqua” right? – isn’t in business in Canada and even in business friendly Alberta, the cost of doing business is going to be substantially greater than in Saudi Arabia.
And the Acwa cost estimates didn’t say how much they would charge to pump it to your neighbourhood and make sure that it was safe to drink.
When did the solar powered desalination start? It was a lot earlier than the author intimates above.
It started the first time the sun shown down on a body of salt water, multiple billions of years ago.
It’s normally called evaporation which is followed by rain.
As long as the water can be sold at a profit, go for it.
From the main section of the above article (i.e., above the addendum from Charles):
“Acwa Power announced the Hassyan sea water desalination plant that will use solar power to produce 180 million gallons of desalinated water, per day . . . The Acwa Power project pegs the [freshwater] cost at $0.37 [per cubic meter]”.
Let’s go to the math for a
realitysanity check:— 180 million gallons is 1,500 million pounds of water
— to evaporate that water at sea-level pressure from an assumed average starting temperature of 80 °F would require 484 million kWh of energy at 100% efficiency
— let’s optimistically assume the evaporation process can be performed at 80% overall energy conversion efficiency (the other 20% appears as thermal losses in the desalination plant)
— let’s furthermore optimistically assume that we can recover 80% of the invested energy from the ~212 °F water vapor (via counter-flow heat exchanger use; i.e., using the heat of condensation of the water and a reduction in the condensed liquid temperature as the means to heat-up the water being fed to the evaporator assuming a steady flow process), with the optimistic assumption that the condensed fresh water is output at 80 °F, same as the seawater intake temperature.
— the net result in that (484 million kWh)*[(1/0.8)-0.8] = 218 million kWh of energy is required over a 24-hr day
— now, if we assume there will be no massive backup batteries used in the Acwa Power desalination plant (due to the enormous up-front capital cost of such) and furthermore very optimistically assume that solar power is generated at an yearly average of 12 hours per day, the required average daily solar energy input translates to (218 million kWh)/(12 hours) = 18 million kW
— conservatively assuming there are never cloudy skies at the location of the proposed desalination plant, the maximum normal surface irradiance would be approximately 1000 W/m^2 at sea level on a clear day (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance ).
— assuming that photovoltaic solar panels will be used to convert solar energy to electricity that will then be used to evaporate the saltwater input to the plant, the highest conversion efficiency currently available with mass-production PV solar panels is about 23%
(ref: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/reviews/solar/most-efficient-solar-panels )
— therefore, the referenced 180 million gallon per day desalination plant will conservatively require at least [(18 million kW)/(1 kW/m^2)]*(1/0.23) = 78 million m^2 of solar PV panel area, equivalent to a square “solar farm” 8,850 m (5.5 miles) on a side, with no space between panels!
— today’s commercial price range for residential solar PV panels runs $4-10 per square foot: if one very optimistically assumes the bulk purchase price to equip the Acwa Power project would be only $2 square foot ($21.50/m^2), the projected cost of such a required area of PV panels be at least $1.7 billion USD, not including installation cost!
— at the proposed fresh water output price of $0.37/m^3 ($.0014/gal) and an asserted output of 180 million gallons per day, it will take at least $1.7 billion/(.0014/gal*180 million gal/day) = 6,750 days = 18 years just to pay for the solar PV panels (assuming no maintenance or replacements)
Bottom line: the proposed Acwa Power desalination plant is totally infeasible and will never be built at its claimed size.
Whoa – they are not going to distill the water, way too wasteful of energy!
They’re probably going to use reverse osmosis or some other filtering techniques.
Again, from the above article, as I quoted at the top of my previous post:
“Acwa Power announced the Hassyan sea water desalination plant that will use solar power to produce 180 million gallons of desalinated water, per day.”
(my bold emphasis added for your benefit).
I need not even comment on the size and cost of attempting to use RO to produce 180 million gallons at day from a seawater/saltwater source.
https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/energy/2023/04/14/saudi-arabias-acwa-power-to-develop-6773-million-desalination-project-on-red-sea-coast/
It’s reverse osmosis.
Why would you convert the Sun’s energy at 20-odd% efficiency to electricity only to use it to boil the water?
Might as well directly concentrate it if you want to boil the water.
But boiling the water is unnecessary if you can just filter out the salt and so on with reverse osmosis.
If it’s reverse osmosis, then the above article is incorrect in stating that it’s solar power that is doing the desalination. Sure, some electricity is needed to power to water pumps and plant instrumentation but the process of desalination is then performed by physical chemistry, not solar power.
That is, unless the desalination facility includes a massive solar-powered plant devoted solely to the daily manufacturing of millions of square meters of osmotic membranes that will have to be replace due to becoming clogged from the high levels of salt in seawater.
Try to be consistent – in your comments you describe turning the sunshine into electricity and then using it to distill the water, so you aren’t using the solar power directly either.
Acwa, unsurprisingly, is also developing concentrated solar, and if they don’t have to worry about molten salts and energy storage and just use all that heat to distill the water directly (and probably produce some green hydrogen for those idiots who pay a premium for that), it might make a go of it.
The article addendum features how wind power – direct mechanical – can also be used to drive the reverse osmosis.
So for countries without fossil fuels and international buying power but with the right sun and wind conditions it might make sense.
Would be worthless here in Southern Ontario sitting right next to a huge chunk of the world’s fresh water. And our water treatment plants put the water back cleaner than we sucked it out.
In your reply comments, you describe “. . . how wind power – direct mechanical – can also be used to drive the reverse osmosis”, so methinks your own position implies this approach would not be using solar power directly either.
Now, you started off saying something about trying to be consistent . . .
Acwa, unsurprisingly, is also developing solar PV farms. Here is a quote obtained from a link provided in the thenationalnews.com article that you referenced earlier that established the system would use reverse osmosis (hah! hah!) for the massive, 180 million gallon per day desalination plant:
“The company was this year selected as the preferred bidder to develop two solar photovoltaic plants in Indonesia, South-east Asia’s largest economy.
“The two projects are the Singkarak floating plant in Sumatra with a capacity of 50MW and another 60MW plant in Java.”
Sure we’ve all witnessed how well the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project, a solar thermal (light energy concentrator) power plant located in the desert in Tonapah, NV, (about 190 miles NW ofy Las Vegas) has worked out.
— ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_Dunes_Solar_Energy_Project
“Tonopah Solar Energy filed for bankruptcy on July 30, 2020. Pending the approval of the bankruptcy court, a $200 million settlement with the remaining debtors — Tonopah Solar Energy LLC and ACS Cobra — for the return of taxpayer dollars was also announced at the end of July 2020. The amount is less than half of what taxpayers are owed on the outstanding $425 million of public debt.”
The name plate capacity of the Crescent Dunes solar thermal power plant was 110 MW . . . that would be, oh, about 0.11 million kW of my above-calculated 18 million kW of average solar power needed continuously for 12 hours each day to desalinate 180 million gallons of water per day.
IOW, about 164 solar thermal plants the size of the Crescent Dunes plant would be needed . . . assuming they could somehow be made to work.
The Crescent Dunes power plant cost is stated to be $0.975 billion and its mirror collector area is give as 1.2 million m^2 (same Wikipedia reference). I will leave it to you to multiply those numbers by 164 to see how feasible such an approach is compared to my number calculated above assuming PV panels.
Hints for you:
a) there’s no such thing as a free lunch,
b) things are not always as they might seem to be on first blush.
When I’ve ever thought about this. Seems smart until you think, but why? Why not have a nuclear power plant that can go 24/7 365 days a year. If you look at equipment costs and managing plants with people and not just on paper, nuclear wins every time.
Hmmm . . . there is this:
“The newest reactor to enter service is Vogtle Unit 3 at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia that began commercial operation on July 31, 2023. The next-youngest operating reactor is Watts Bar Unit 2, in Tennessee, which began commercial electricity generation in October 2016.”
— https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=228&t=21
So, one nuclear power plant put into operation in the last 7 years . . . yeah, that sounds like winning.
/sarc
“Maybe the pipelines bring sea water inland for desalination, where vast stretches of nearly empty land could be utilized for solar desalination.”
well water would have to be piped either way of course … I have some small experience with saltwater and pipes … in the Navy we used salt water in our toilets … and every month we had clean out the pipes (by hand) that had accumulated a salt crust on the inner side of the pipes, often restricting flow by 1/3 to 1/2 … not saying its impossible to pipe salt water but its not as easy as fresh water …
but the idea of using solar powered desalination is a good one that some folks have obviously jumped on …
There is another major issue with that:
Assuming it’s RO, you don’t recover much of the pumped water. Most of it is pumped out again as saltier brine.
So you are going to have to pump a lot more water and you are going to contaminate that “empty land” with brine lakes and/or rivers or use huge evaporation ponds (I guess you may be able to start exporting salt 🙂 )
Evaporation ponds will exactly be the ticket – process the brine for lithium, uranium, and anything else that has shot up in price because of the mad, crazy, insane rush towards the Net-Zero cliff.
Agree with this article, I have thought for quite a while that desal is one of the few logical uses for solar. You use the water storage tanks to manage the output variability. To me the obvious place to do this is Africa where potable water appears to be an ongoing concern and solar intensity should be very high.
I would love to know why this hasn’t been pursued yet. Seems like an easy win/win.
In the real world, the relatively low all-around trip efficiency associated with:
a) pumping saltwater to the evaporation section of the desalination plant,
b) supplying the energy required to evaporate the water from room temperature to slightly above its normal boiling point (i.e. >= 212 °F at sea-level),
c) removing the salt left behind from the water’s evaporation and making sure that it doesn’t contaminate the condensation section of the plant,
d) supplying the coolant to the condensation section (either straight-pumped intake seawater via reverse flow heat exchanger, or fan-driven forced cooling using ambient air) to change the water vapor back to liquid water at slight below 212 °F,
e) supplying the coolant to further reduce the ~212 deg F liquid water down to a more easily handled freshwater output temperature in the range of 80–100 °F,
f) pumping the freshwater out as needed into storage tanks and/or distribution pipes to nearby cities, and
g) plant “downtimes” and recover time & energy needed to get back to steady-state operation following maintenance/repairs/upgrades and power interruptions,
results in the fact that it takes of good amount of energy expenditure to perform practical desalination on a commercial, industrial-scale.
In a few places, the cost of that energy (and the sunk cost of capital to build the desalination plant in the first place) amortizes to be is less than the cost of obtaining freshwater from alternative sources such as underground aquifers, rivers, natural lakes, and dammed lakes, but in most places it simply costs more . . . hence, not an easy win/win . . . hence, not such widespread construction and use of desalination plants around the globe.
But “the times, they are a-changin”.
Africa is big. all the way from Egypt to South Africa. In some places “solar intensity should be very high.” works, but not everywhere.