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As a corollary to that, a lot of deserts terminate in coastline. Generating desalinated water from solar in these areas has the side benefit of "creating useful
by bruce511 2y ago
As a corollary to that, a lot of deserts terminate in coastline. Generating desalinated water from solar in these areas has the side benefit of "creating useful land".
What's left to figure out is the ratio of panels to water to land, and in turn whether the long term value of the land is worth the investment. (Dubai would argue it is.)
- woleium 2y agouseful land at the expense of dumping brine in the ocean, which would have unforeseen consequences at scale, i am sure.
- raffraffraff 2y agoCould that not also be stored, or have some use?
- thenthenthen 2y agoMolten salt reactor?
- pshirshov 2y agoSodium batteries?
- bruce511 2y agoI think there might be local effects from elevated brine levels, but overall nothing substantial. Compared to the amount of water that is naturally desalinated every day (ie via evaporation), even large scale desalination is a drop in the bucket. Desalination is already operating on a massive scale in the middle east, and we're not seeing any medium scale effects there. Elevated salinity dissipates very quickly from the point of outflow.
- containedgravel 2y ago>Elevated salinity dissipates very quickly from the point of outflow. I've not seen any evidence supporting this is the case, but the opposite; large swathes of high-saline concentrated blobs sweeping accross the sealife, killing it. We've had to build specialized very long outflow pipes to give the brine even a change to level
- abdullahkhalids 2y agoThis will destroy the near shore ecosystem, because desalination dumps brine that kills everything, while at the same time destroying the desert ecosystem because it gets converted into something local flora and fauna can no longer live in.
- bruce511 2y agoI don't think we need worry too much about desert habitats being removed. Deserts are large (and getting larger) and the amount of land which could realistically benefit from desalination is a tiny fraction of that. While brine can impact local salinity, so does treated-effluent outflows (mixed together they are neutral.) Regardless elevated brine levels drop off sharply from the point of outflow.
- ehnto 2y agoWe are really good at mis-estimating scale. So we know brine decreases sharply from the point of outflow, but do we know what 50 years of brine outflow at tens of thousands of locations around the world would do? If it's profitable, it'll be implemented all over, and underestimating that cumulative effect is something we would plead willful ignorance on as we have done with other industries in the past. Second point I will try to make, habitats are often unique and small, we would just want to make sure an ecosystem is truly ubiquitous before destroying a small pocket of ecosystem. Especially now, there are animals that live in just one or few specific spots. We should be careful.
- tzs 2y agoI'd expect that long term the brine would do bad things near the places it is released but would not have any noticeable long term consequences much farther away as long as we don't discharge it somewhere where it destroys something local that turns out to be a dependency of something far away. That's because almost all the water that is taken out of the ocean will make its way back to the ocean. We just borrow it for a while. If all the water used by humans were taken from the ocean, we'd take about 1/300000th of the ocean's water per year. Most of that will be back in the ocean within 200 years. That puts the cap on the amount of water that would be missing from the ocean of 1/1500th of its volume, which means that the steady state increase in salt concentration would be less than 0.1%, which is much less than the natural variation in ocean salt levels.