6 ms·

Wind Turbine Makes 1,000 Liters Of Clean Water A Day In The Desert

108 points by ph0rque 15y ago

ktizo 15y ago
That is an exceptionally good idea. As far as green tech goes, I reckon a load of these combined with polytunnel aquaculture could be on a par with the seawater greenhouse, it would probably produce less water per hectare but then it doesn't need the big pipe to the sea - http://www.seawatergreenhouse.com http://www.seawatergreenhouse.com - would be interesting to see a proper comparison.
Egregore 15y ago
Next step will be to transform the condensed water into hydrogen for energy storage.
- ktizo 15y ago
  I think drinking it and growing food might be more of a direct application.
- ars 15y ago
  No, that is not the next step. That is a silly step. You need a lot more water as water than you do as hydrogen. For hydrogen sea water is more reasonable, and transporting it isn't a problem since you don't need much. In any case, hydrogen can not be energy storage since it leaks too easily. It also damages any metal container it's stored in (and leaks right though plastic). Glass might work.
sparknlaunch12 15y ago
Great story. Check out a recent podcast from Stanford e corner. Jeff Church - The Wave of Social Entrepreneurship. He talks about encouraging startups to look at social causes. His own Nika bottled water give their profits towards clean water. Positive way to go about building your startup.
nknight 15y ago
Yeeeah, that's a heck of a lot of water in a desert. I'm a bit worried about the cost, though. They don't mention per-unit cost anywhere, but they're comparing its size to 300-500kW turbines. If memory serves, those are a few hundred thousand a piece? So maybe we can assume these will be ~$300k...? Supposedly, minimum health and sanitation is 20 litres per person per day. Assuming these last the 30 years stated on Eole's website, and consistently output 1000 litres/day, and not counting any maintenance costs, $200/person/year. Can the areas that need these things the most afford $200/person/year?
- illumen 15y ago
  Water desalinization plants run over $4 billion easily. They do about 200 gigalitres per year. Of course these things will get cheaper, and you don't need to pay $4 billion, you can set up smaller numbers of them.
  - mseebach 15y ago
    I think your numbers are off. 200 gigalitres would provide for 27 million people at 20 litres per day. If that plant can last 30 years as well, discounting any maintenance, that's $4.8/person/year. And, tangentially, desalination plants need salt water, so only works near the coast. The wind-turbine would work anywhere, regardless of the distance to the coast.
    - vacri 15y ago
      If you have 27 million people in a catchment area, they are going to be using far more than 20 litres per day per person. Melbourne is a non-desert city in a Western, water-conscious country, that in 2008 was nearing the end of a 10-year drought with water reserves starting to approach the 'panic' levels. The city was on ever-tightening water restrictions and water consciousness was pretty much part of daily conversation. In the end, three and a half million people were using 277 litres per day per capita. What you've forgotten is that many people need industry, and industry needs a lot of water. http://www.melbournewater.com.au/content/water_conservation/water_use/water_use.asp?bhjs=0 http://www.melbournewater.com.au/content/water_conservation/...
ars 15y ago
"Air is taken in through vents in the nose cone of the turbine and then heated by a generator to make steam. The steam goes through a cooling compressor that creates moisture which is then condensed and collected." Um what?? Why are they heating air? And you don't make steam if you heat air. That's either a huge typo, or whoever wrote that has no idea what they are talking about. Maybe they tried to summarize the source without understanding it? You could either cool the air to condense the water, or compress the air, which heats it temporarily, then you cool it back down and collect the water. It's ideal to recover the energy either way though and this process doesn't seem to do that. And in any case what does this have to do with a wind turbine? This is basically a de-humidifyer. You can power those with anything - wind, electricity, gasoline. I suggest they use the wind turbine to make electricity, and then power the de-humidifyer from that. That way you can pick and choose what you want to power, and you can power the de-humidifyer from something else when necessary. BTW the link they have on the words "simple process" in fact has nothing whatsoever to do with this process. Who writes this stuff? Someone who never learned any science?
- electromagnetic 15y ago
  Forget the stupid writing in the article. The reason why they may be using the wind turbine directly is if they're using mechanical energy to fire the compressors, etc to run the process. Compression of the intake air is likely best served mechanically. Cooling the air could be served mechanically, although an air conditioning compressor is likely better designed to run electrically, but again it depends on the scale used to determine if mechanical would be better or not. Although I'm wondering if the compressed air itself could be used to power the condenser. If the air is compressed enough, would an appropriate design allow the expansion of the compressed air to cool the condenser it's escaping from? Because I know air compressors for air tools build up water inside, and they are purposefully designed to inhibit this. Also the reverse-osmosis, or whatever filtration used, is likely best served by producing the water and letting it filter down through gravity pressure under the 30+ft drop from the unit to the holding tank. Although, it would be more ideal to produce say 200L a day and produce energy too so that a few of these would provide water and electricity to a village and everyone won't die when their water producing turbine breaks down and takes a month to get repaired.
pingou 15y ago
Is this water a virtually unlimited resource or can it dry up if these turbines are implemented on a large scale ?
- rmccue 15y ago
  It uses the humidity in the air, so it's possible that with a larger number of these in the area, the humidity would be reduced to a point where there is none left to remove.
  - ars 15y ago
    Nah, there's wind, and the ocean. Less humid air evaporates ocean water quicker, and the wind will circulate the air till it eventually reaches the ocean. The Earth is enormous, it would take a staggering number of these to make any dent in humidity, and even then it would be a local dent only. Don't forget water is a closed loop - this water they consume is also eventually returned to the environment (sweat, etc.), where it evaporates and restores the humidity.
    - downx3 15y ago
      I like the idea of taking the water back out the sea and placing it in underground aquifers. Some are are seriously depleted through industrial agricultural farming. Would be nice if you could just pull a cloud or two down from the sky.
drostie 15y ago
I had this idea in high school! I thought it wouldn't work in the desert though, or surely it would already have been tried. Basically, we were reading about just how difficult it is to get water out of saltwater in coastal communities, and the massive power costs involved, and I just thought, "well, we sometimes have to use a dehumidifier at home, and I know that that runs on the mains power and could generate easily enough water for two or three of us to survive. Coastal environments have very wet air, so just let the Sun act on the ocean to do the hard part of desalination, and we reap the benefits of clean water?" I gave up because I'd calculated that this would also probably cost more money than poor coastal areas had, but yeah, wind turbines have grown amazingly in the past several years and the principle is pretty sound. (It is not clear what the longer-term environmental impact would be, but it's possible that if we deploy too many of these things, inland droughts could become more severe due to lack of cloud formation.) I'm glad to see that someone has paired renewable energy and automatic solar evaporation with the problem of desalination. Well worth some charity money, though the company as it stands appears to be for-profit. Would be nice to see if a charity could set some of these up in Wajir, Kenya, as a politically safer experiment towards deploying them into the drought-ridden Jubaland in Somalia.
- brlewis 15y ago
  You were probably not the first with this idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatooine#Moisture_farms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatooine#Moisture_farms I'm surprised this article has been on HN for 10 hours already without any Star Wars references.
  - rthomas6 15y ago
    Star Wars stole the idea from the Dune series, actually, so the idea is even older than that.
creativeone 15y ago
What if you combined these: http://sizedoesntmatter.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture-92.png http://sizedoesntmatter.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture-92.pn... with the wind turbines? Free heated water... Am i missing something? If this is possible i will be the first proud salesperson of this in Israel.
- downx3 15y ago
  I doubt you'd care for hot water in the dessert. You could just fill a black bag. Cool clean water is probably preferential.
  - chris_wot 15y ago
    It gets pretty cold at nightime I've been told...
    - downx3 15y ago
      You could use solar water heating as a vector to trap the suns heat in an underground heat store, that you then release at night. How cold does it get? Edit: I just tried to find out about night time temperatures. On the wikipedia page 'desert', it suggests it only gets as cold as 0 degrees C. Although I did find a remark that Antarctica was technically a desert. I just camped out in temperatures below 0 weekend gone, and it wasn't that comfortable, but I was staying under a thin piece of plastic. If I'd have been a bit better prepared it would have been much more bearable.
      - dalke 15y ago
        There are hot deserts and cold deserts. The Gobi has a yearly average temperature of 2.8 °C, with a January average of −26.5 °C and July of 17.5 °C . Red Desert, Wyoming averages -7°C in January. My relatives in Michigan mentioned that there's a Polar Bear scouting award for camping when it's below 0°F, or -18°C. My own sleeping bag is only rated for -2°C.
        15y ago
downx3 15y ago
Nice, and I thought this was good: http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/living-without-water-atacama-fog-catching-nets/11949.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/living-without-water...
uvdiv 15y ago
There's a slight disconnect between the PR and spec sheet, which predicts an output of 1,000 L/day in a "temperate zone" (60% relative humidity, 25 ºC), or 350 L/day in a "desert zone" (30% r.h., 35 ºC). http://www.eolewater.com/assets/files/PDF/Specification%20Sheet%20WMS1000%20WT%20light.pdf http://www.eolewater.com/assets/files/PDF/Specification%20Sh...
- uvdiv 15y ago
  Another observation from the datasheet: this seems extremely energy-intensive, even compared to desalination. Modern desalination ranges from about 3 kWh/meter^3 (reverse osmosis) to 13-25 kWh/meter^3 (multistage flash distillation) [1] [electricity-equivalent kWh]. The wind turbine's spec sheet says it has two scroll-compressors rated 30 kW combined. I'm not sure about the capacity factor these compressors operate at (no data given), but if it's basically that of the wind turbine itself (should be about ~20%), that's ~140 kWh (mechanical energy)/day for 1 meter^3/day water, or 140 kWh per m^3. Triple that for a desert zone (same energy, one-third the output). [1] http://www.desware.net/desa4.aspx http://www.desware.net/desa4.aspx
outworlder 15y ago
I went to the article expecting a "windtrap" design. I came here expecting a "Dune" reference. Got disappointed on both counts. Anyway, shouldn't this thing use a bigger collection area?
ams6110 15y ago
This is a better use of wind power than generating electricity for the grid. Since the wind doesn't always blow, use wind power for systems where it's easy to store the product. Storing water is easy. Storing electricity is not.

108 points by ph0rque 15y ago

ktizo 15y ago

That is an exceptionally good idea. As far as green tech goes, I reckon a load of these combined with polytunnel aquaculture could be on a par with the seawater greenhouse, it would probably produce less water per hectare but then it doesn't need the big pipe to the sea - http://www.seawatergreenhouse.com http://www.seawatergreenhouse.com - would be interesting to see a proper comparison.

Egregore 15y ago

Next step will be to transform the condensed water into hydrogen for energy storage.

ktizo 15y ago
I think drinking it and growing food might be more of a direct application.
ars 15y ago
No, that is not the next step. That is a silly step. You need a lot more water as water than you do as hydrogen. For hydrogen sea water is more reasonable, and transporting it isn't a problem since you don't need much. In any case, hydrogen can not be energy storage since it leaks too easily. It also damages any metal container it's stored in (and leaks right though plastic). Glass might work.

sparknlaunch12 15y ago

Great story. Check out a recent podcast from Stanford e corner. Jeff Church - The Wave of Social Entrepreneurship. He talks about encouraging startups to look at social causes. His own Nika bottled water give their profits towards clean water. Positive way to go about building your startup.

nknight 15y ago

Yeeeah, that's a heck of a lot of water in a desert. I'm a bit worried about the cost, though. They don't mention per-unit cost anywhere, but they're comparing its size to 300-500kW turbines. If memory serves, those are a few hundred thousand a piece? So maybe we can assume these will be ~$300k...? Supposedly, minimum health and sanitation is 20 litres per person per day. Assuming these last the 30 years stated on Eole's website, and consistently output 1000 litres/day, and not counting any maintenance costs, $200/person/year. Can the areas that need these things the most afford $200/person/year?

illumen 15y ago
Water desalinization plants run over $4 billion easily. They do about 200 gigalitres per year. Of course these things will get cheaper, and you don't need to pay $4 billion, you can set up smaller numbers of them.
- mseebach 15y ago
  I think your numbers are off. 200 gigalitres would provide for 27 million people at 20 litres per day. If that plant can last 30 years as well, discounting any maintenance, that's $4.8/person/year. And, tangentially, desalination plants need salt water, so only works near the coast. The wind-turbine would work anywhere, regardless of the distance to the coast.
  - vacri 15y ago
    If you have 27 million people in a catchment area, they are going to be using far more than 20 litres per day per person. Melbourne is a non-desert city in a Western, water-conscious country, that in 2008 was nearing the end of a 10-year drought with water reserves starting to approach the 'panic' levels. The city was on ever-tightening water restrictions and water consciousness was pretty much part of daily conversation. In the end, three and a half million people were using 277 litres per day per capita. What you've forgotten is that many people need industry, and industry needs a lot of water. http://www.melbournewater.com.au/content/water_conservation/water_use/water_use.asp?bhjs=0 http://www.melbournewater.com.au/content/water_conservation/...

ars 15y ago

"Air is taken in through vents in the nose cone of the turbine and then heated by a generator to make steam. The steam goes through a cooling compressor that creates moisture which is then condensed and collected." Um what?? Why are they heating air? And you don't make steam if you heat air. That's either a huge typo, or whoever wrote that has no idea what they are talking about. Maybe they tried to summarize the source without understanding it? You could either cool the air to condense the water, or compress the air, which heats it temporarily, then you cool it back down and collect the water. It's ideal to recover the energy either way though and this process doesn't seem to do that. And in any case what does this have to do with a wind turbine? This is basically a de-humidifyer. You can power those with anything - wind, electricity, gasoline. I suggest they use the wind turbine to make electricity, and then power the de-humidifyer from that. That way you can pick and choose what you want to power, and you can power the de-humidifyer from something else when necessary. BTW the link they have on the words "simple process" in fact has nothing whatsoever to do with this process. Who writes this stuff? Someone who never learned any science?

electromagnetic 15y ago
Forget the stupid writing in the article. The reason why they may be using the wind turbine directly is if they're using mechanical energy to fire the compressors, etc to run the process. Compression of the intake air is likely best served mechanically. Cooling the air could be served mechanically, although an air conditioning compressor is likely better designed to run electrically, but again it depends on the scale used to determine if mechanical would be better or not. Although I'm wondering if the compressed air itself could be used to power the condenser. If the air is compressed enough, would an appropriate design allow the expansion of the compressed air to cool the condenser it's escaping from? Because I know air compressors for air tools build up water inside, and they are purposefully designed to inhibit this. Also the reverse-osmosis, or whatever filtration used, is likely best served by producing the water and letting it filter down through gravity pressure under the 30+ft drop from the unit to the holding tank. Although, it would be more ideal to produce say 200L a day and produce energy too so that a few of these would provide water and electricity to a village and everyone won't die when their water producing turbine breaks down and takes a month to get repaired.

pingou 15y ago

Is this water a virtually unlimited resource or can it dry up if these turbines are implemented on a large scale ?

rmccue 15y ago
It uses the humidity in the air, so it's possible that with a larger number of these in the area, the humidity would be reduced to a point where there is none left to remove.
- ars 15y ago
  Nah, there's wind, and the ocean. Less humid air evaporates ocean water quicker, and the wind will circulate the air till it eventually reaches the ocean. The Earth is enormous, it would take a staggering number of these to make any dent in humidity, and even then it would be a local dent only. Don't forget water is a closed loop - this water they consume is also eventually returned to the environment (sweat, etc.), where it evaporates and restores the humidity.
  - downx3 15y ago
    I like the idea of taking the water back out the sea and placing it in underground aquifers. Some are are seriously depleted through industrial agricultural farming. Would be nice if you could just pull a cloud or two down from the sky.

drostie 15y ago

I had this idea in high school! I thought it wouldn't work in the desert though, or surely it would already have been tried. Basically, we were reading about just how difficult it is to get water out of saltwater in coastal communities, and the massive power costs involved, and I just thought, "well, we sometimes have to use a dehumidifier at home, and I know that that runs on the mains power and could generate easily enough water for two or three of us to survive. Coastal environments have very wet air, so just let the Sun act on the ocean to do the hard part of desalination, and we reap the benefits of clean water?" I gave up because I'd calculated that this would also probably cost more money than poor coastal areas had, but yeah, wind turbines have grown amazingly in the past several years and the principle is pretty sound. (It is not clear what the longer-term environmental impact would be, but it's possible that if we deploy too many of these things, inland droughts could become more severe due to lack of cloud formation.) I'm glad to see that someone has paired renewable energy and automatic solar evaporation with the problem of desalination. Well worth some charity money, though the company as it stands appears to be for-profit. Would be nice to see if a charity could set some of these up in Wajir, Kenya, as a politically safer experiment towards deploying them into the drought-ridden Jubaland in Somalia.

brlewis 15y ago
You were probably not the first with this idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatooine#Moisture_farms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatooine#Moisture_farms I'm surprised this article has been on HN for 10 hours already without any Star Wars references.
- rthomas6 15y ago
  Star Wars stole the idea from the Dune series, actually, so the idea is even older than that.

creativeone 15y ago

What if you combined these: http://sizedoesntmatter.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture-92.png http://sizedoesntmatter.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture-92.pn... with the wind turbines? Free heated water... Am i missing something? If this is possible i will be the first proud salesperson of this in Israel.

downx3 15y ago
I doubt you'd care for hot water in the dessert. You could just fill a black bag. Cool clean water is probably preferential.
- chris_wot 15y ago
  It gets pretty cold at nightime I've been told...
  - downx3 15y ago
    You could use solar water heating as a vector to trap the suns heat in an underground heat store, that you then release at night. How cold does it get? Edit: I just tried to find out about night time temperatures. On the wikipedia page 'desert', it suggests it only gets as cold as 0 degrees C. Although I did find a remark that Antarctica was technically a desert. I just camped out in temperatures below 0 weekend gone, and it wasn't that comfortable, but I was staying under a thin piece of plastic. If I'd have been a bit better prepared it would have been much more bearable.
    - dalke 15y ago
      There are hot deserts and cold deserts. The Gobi has a yearly average temperature of 2.8 °C, with a January average of −26.5 °C and July of 17.5 °C . Red Desert, Wyoming averages -7°C in January. My relatives in Michigan mentioned that there's a Polar Bear scouting award for camping when it's below 0°F, or -18°C. My own sleeping bag is only rated for -2°C.
      - 15y ago

downx3 15y ago

Nice, and I thought this was good: http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/living-without-water-atacama-fog-catching-nets/11949.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/living-without-water...

uvdiv 15y ago

There's a slight disconnect between the PR and spec sheet, which predicts an output of 1,000 L/day in a "temperate zone" (60% relative humidity, 25 ºC), or 350 L/day in a "desert zone" (30% r.h., 35 ºC). http://www.eolewater.com/assets/files/PDF/Specification%20Sheet%20WMS1000%20WT%20light.pdf http://www.eolewater.com/assets/files/PDF/Specification%20Sh...

uvdiv 15y ago
Another observation from the datasheet: this seems extremely energy-intensive, even compared to desalination. Modern desalination ranges from about 3 kWh/meter^3 (reverse osmosis) to 13-25 kWh/meter^3 (multistage flash distillation) [1] [electricity-equivalent kWh]. The wind turbine's spec sheet says it has two scroll-compressors rated 30 kW combined. I'm not sure about the capacity factor these compressors operate at (no data given), but if it's basically that of the wind turbine itself (should be about ~20%), that's ~140 kWh (mechanical energy)/day for 1 meter^3/day water, or 140 kWh per m^3. Triple that for a desert zone (same energy, one-third the output). [1] http://www.desware.net/desa4.aspx http://www.desware.net/desa4.aspx

outworlder 15y ago

I went to the article expecting a "windtrap" design. I came here expecting a "Dune" reference. Got disappointed on both counts. Anyway, shouldn't this thing use a bigger collection area?

ams6110 15y ago

This is a better use of wind power than generating electricity for the grid. Since the wind doesn't always blow, use wind power for systems where it's easy to store the product. Storing water is easy. Storing electricity is not.