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Article puts the cost to produce a cubic meter of water at $1-$2 In the bay area, I'm paying ~$2.80 per cubic meter. I don't see why it's not feasible. Yes,
by bagels 3y ago
Article puts the cost to produce a cubic meter of water at $1-$2
In the bay area, I'm paying ~$2.80 per cubic meter.
I don't see why it's not feasible.
Yes, there are transmission/pumping costs. Assuming the water we're getting now is free, that's still only ~50-75% increase in cost over current costs.
- labster 3y agoArticle is 15 years old, energy and labor prices have increased a lot. We need a new cost estimate.
- pstuart 3y agoSolar prices have plummeted, and that use case can skip storage issues (just run when there's power available). Obviously land, labor, and infra cost are not so simple.
- nerdawson 3y agoIf you use solar to generate electricity then the cost of that electricity is whatever you’re missing out on by not selling it to the grid.
- fbdab103 3y agoAs a consumer, falling solar prices have not led to a noticeable decrease in my electrical bill.
- cronix 3y agoAs a recent convert to solar, we no longer have any electric bill, period.
- ourmandave 3y agoThey haven't tried to bill you for "maintaining the grid" cost?
- markdown 3y agoNo, but hopefully they do soon, or tax me somehow. Having a grid is important.
- dpierce9 3y agoWhat do you think the price would be without solar? The answer: higher.
- redeeman 3y agosure, but only because they purposely exclude those that would be cheaper :)
- etimberg 3y agoAt some point the price of the bill is dominated by the fixed transmission costs which won't go away as long as there is a power grid.
- ehnto 3y agoDesal plants need to be running constantly and incur untennable startup costs otherwise, if I am not mistaken. Perhaps state of the art has fixed that issue.
- scythe 3y agoDesalination seems to be well-positioned to take advantage of variable energy prices, particularly in dry-summer climates where demand for water increases at the same time as solar energy availability. If you run the desalination system when energy is cheapest, your energy storage problem becomes a water storage problem, but a simpler one than with pumped-hydroelectric storage. I haven't seen a detailed analysis, but this could look good for California, notwithstanding the other problems with desalination (ecological).
- 10u152 3y agoAbsolutely, but it's a scale problem. Say you want to produce 1000m3 a day. Well you can build a small plant that makes 41m3 ish an hour and run it 24/7. If you want to produce 1000m3 a day in the three or four hours where solar energy is very cheap you need a plant that does 250m3 an hour - or about 5x the size. So your energy is cheaper but your capital cost is 5x or so.
- scythe 3y agoIf you save enough on energy, you can switch your system to save on capital. RO has a fancy nanostructured membrane but electrodialysis or MSF might be easier to build at the cost of 20-50% worse efficiency.
- gonzo41 3y agoIf you build a few batteries next to the plant and that problem is solved.
- pstuart 3y agoAnother thing I'm curious about -- Dean Kamen's "Slingshot". Seems like we'd be well served if his vision was realized: https://www.slingshotdoc.com/the-film https://www.slingshotdoc.com/the-film
- tuatoru 3y agoDesal costs seem to have decreased a lot since 2008. Now maybe one-third as much, based on a quick image search for charts of the price trend of desalination.
- wdr1 3y agoAdditionally, if there was a nationwide push to nuclear power, we'd have cheap, clean energy -- putting a sizable dent in both clean drinking water & climate change at the same time.
- adamrezich 3y agothat would fuck up too many monopolies and political narratives though
- ianai 3y agoI think what you’re really saying is it won’t be until enough people demand a change to a safe path to push through political and monopolistic powers. I fear it’ll take the thing that ultimately allows progress in sciences, the eventual demise by natural causes of powered opponents. (Which may itself never come due to inheritance.)
- myspy 3y agoI'd like to ask this here again because I haven't got a clear answer yet. What about building a plant, getting the fuel, storing the fuel, and decommissioning the plant, how is that affecting the cheap and the clean energy in total greenhouse gas emissions? Is it worthwhile compared to wind farms and solar power? And where is the fuel stored in the States, because here in Germany it's hard to find a place to store it for 10 millennia.
- WinstonSmith84 3y agoSome countries recycle nuclear fuel (e.g. France and some other European countries) whereas others don't (the US). It has obviously some costs, but it also decreases the waste. The re-processing center in Europe is located at La Hague (Netherlands). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Hague_site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Hague_site http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/wang2/ http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/wang2/
- 3y ago
- gruez 3y ago>I don't see why it's not feasible. Realistically speaking, because buying water rights from existing farmers is probably even cheaper.
- LoganDark 3y agoSee, "Why is Soda Cheaper Than Water?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nlkW16t5lM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nlkW16t5lM It's probable the reason water costs that much for you is because people are still willing to pay that price for it. Capitalism truly sucks.
- gruez 3y ago> See, "Why is Soda Cheaper Than Water?" Except the core premise is not true, so far as I can tell. To confirm this I went on Uber Eats, looked for chain restaurants near Salesforce Tower, and surveyed their beverage menus. At initial glance, most restaurants charged more for "water" than for soda. However, on further inspection this is because in those cases, the soda was dispensed from a fountain and the water was bottled. The latter obviously would cost more than the former, because of the cost of having to transport individual bottles. This can hardly be attributed to "Capitalism truly sucks". Furthermore, in cases where a soda fountain is available, the restaurant is legally mandated to provide the water to you for free[1], which makes the cost of water in those places $0. Of the places that only sell bottled beverages (there's surprisingly few): * California Pizza Kitchen charges the same for water as for canned soda, and gives you more water[2] * Chipotle Mexican Grill's cheapest beverage is bottled water[3]. The second cheapest option? San Pellegrino sparkling water, shipped all the way to California from Italy. That said, the economic principle of "thing x costs more because people are willing to pay for it" is probably true (see for instance, airfare that's bought late), but this isn't one of those cases. [1] All restaurants are technically supposed to, but having a soda fountain virtually guarantees that they can't weasel out of it by saying that they only serve bottled beverages and don't have cups for serving tap water [2] https://www.ubereats.com/store/california-pizza-kitchen-53-third-street/FZcDzr6URzO9oA3bTU0-Cg/d98bb83e-3f35-5aee-b622-1b7a9f902749/1c0eea29-64c2-576c-8412-cdc6fece7ace/e45436a5-4e4a-5516-af8f-637ae8de483f https://www.ubereats.com/store/california-pizza-kitchen-53-t... [3] https://www.ubereats.com/store/chipotle-mexican-grill-211-sutter-st/RqcfbUKKRnSNIaojzqO4MQ?diningMode=DELIVERY&pl=JTdCJTIyYWRkcmVzcyUyMiUzQSUyMjQxNSUyME1pc3Npb24lMjBTdCUyMiUyQyUyMnJlZmVyZW5jZSUyMiUzQSUyMmM1YTg5NzBkLTVkOWUtYzJjNS1mNzVlLTBkMWU2Y2Y5NGQyNSUyMiUyQyUyMnJlZmVyZW5jZVR5cGUlMjIlM0ElMjJ1YmVyX3BsYWNlcyUyMiUyQyUyMmxhdGl0dWRlJTIyJTNBMzcuNzg5ODU1JTJDJTIybG9uZ2l0dWRlJTIyJTNBLTEyMi4zOTY4MDElN0Q%3D https://www.ubereats.com/store/chipotle-mexican-grill-211-su...
- ChuckMcM 3y agoAs a person who has run through this particular loop once with local politics (Sunnyvale's northern border is the SF Bay which has former Morton Salt ponds in it) what I ran into was two things, one that there wasn't a cost effective power solution for just desalination, and two, the players don't care about water to individuals (drinking water and what not) because there is absolutely no risk whatsoever in the bay area of not having "enough" of it. The political block that kills it is a combination of local pop saying "we don't want nuclear/cheap power in our back yard" and the folks farming the desert in the central valley saying "If you can't supply farms, why would you do it?" My hope is that one day, small scale nuclear power (sometimes called "modular nuclear power") will make this a reality.
- BurningFrog 3y agoDesalination seems ideal for cheap but unreliable energy like solar or wind. You just need a water reservoir to act as "battery".
- brilee 3y agohttps://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/factobattery/ https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/factobattery/ Using the above methodology, I ran numbers for a desalination factobattery and it's really bad, like two orders of magnitude more expensive than just buying a Li battery to buffer the unreliable energy and running desal 24/7.
- ChuckMcM 3y agoThis right here. Even low grade continual energy supply is better for desal.
- BurningFrog 3y agoBy "battery" here, I just mean a dam that holds a few days worth of fresh water.
- brilee 3y ago
- neodypsis 3y agoYou have cheaper water in the Bay Area than in San Jose, Costa Rica.
- bagels 3y agoThis page disagrees: https://www.costarica.com/business/water-rates https://www.costarica.com/business/water-rates
- neodypsis 3y agoIn many cases you have to pay using only the "121 cubic meters and over" rate due to how the places are built.
- bagels 3y agoStill cheaper.
- neodypsis 3y agoYou are right, I was summing both the sewage discharge and clean water supply costs, which gets you 4.42 USD / m3. But looking for San Francisco tariffs, I see you also pay a separate fee for sewage discharge, with is approximately 5.9 USD / m3 [0]... 0. https://sfpuc.org/sites/default/files/accounts-and-services/Rates_Schedule_Water_Sewer_2023-24.pdf https://sfpuc.org/sites/default/files/accounts-and-services/...
- thomasahle 3y agoIs it possible that desalination at large scale would push the energy demand and price up enough that it would stop being feasible?
- galleywest200 3y agoSure, but could we just build nuclear reactors that power just these intense machines?
- tguvot 3y agoIn Israel, where everything is more expensive, desalination costs are ~$0.4 per cubic meter of water
- andbberger 3y agothat's money we could spend on building infrastructure to divert peak flows on wet years to recharging the central valley aquifer, which is several orders of magnitudes larger than all other reservoirs in the state combined
- cratermoon 3y agoThis came up on HN recently. tl;dr: it's harder than it looks https://practical.engineering/blog/2023/6/28/why-is-desalination-so-difficult https://practical.engineering/blog/2023/6/28/why-is-desalina...
- ainiriand 3y agoWell this it's done in some parts of the world, I am not sure why they claim is not. My brother lives in Lanzarote an the water is extracted from the sea just like this. The energy comes from 2 huge wind turbines in the plant.