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Solar is so cheap that desalination is cheap enough that the only thing that will get appreciably more expensive is water intensive products like beef.
by HappyPanacea 1y ago
Solar is so cheap that desalination is cheap enough that the only thing that will get appreciably more expensive is water intensive products like beef.
- KaiserPro 1y agoDesalination is not just about power, you've have to build and maintain the thing. There are consumables as well.
- igor47 1y agoAlso, the brine. Though I assume if water becomes scarce enough, we'll just dump the brine back into the environment and nature be damned as per usual
- GeoAtreides 1y agoBrine can be piped to deeper depths, or just diluted before dumping, the cost is increased energy demand
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- BurningFrog 1y agoDumping concentrated ocean water back into the ocean just can't be a big problem.
- danaris 1y agoDoesn't brine contain appreciable amounts of lithium—which is highly in demand? Couldn't it be further dried out to harvest that lithium for sale?
- HappyPanacea 1y agoAccording [0], you need 1451 liter per kg of beef. Sorek B will cost $0.41/m3 [1] so water cost will be 0.59$, cheapest beef I could find in quick google here in Israel is $17.68 per kg so 3.3% increase. [0]: https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impacts-of-food [1]: https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/can-desalination-save-a-drying-world/?cf-view https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/can-desalination-save-a-dr...
- daneel_w 1y agoThe Saudis don't seem to have a problem getting it done.
- fulafel 1y agoHow much fruit and vegetable agriculture (topic of the article) are they doing with their desalinated water? Hopefully none as they generate 99+% of their electricity from oil+gas and the climate impact from it would be atrocious.
- daneel_w 1y agoI don't know. Here are some numbers to plug into your calculator: "The country's water needs were estimated at 24.8 billion m³ in 2015, with an average fixed annual growth rate of 7 percent. With 84 percent of the total water demand, the agricultural sector is the largest consumer of water in the country." "In 2015, these plants had a total production capacity of 6.28 million m³ per day, which increased to 7.4 million m³ per day by 2020. By 2024, the combined production from both public and private desalination plants reached approximately 11.5 million m³ per day." https://saudipedia.com/en/article/2549/government-and-politics/water-and-agriculture/production-of-desalinated-water-in-saudi-arabia https://saudipedia.com/en/article/2549/government-and-politi...
- fmajid 1y agoNo, they bought huge quantities of senior water rights in California and are shipping alfalfa grown there back to Saudi, essentially laundering water.
- bee_rider 1y agoIs it really that cheap already? I thought desalination was more like an “not enough power by an order of magnitude” type problem. Solar that is a little cheaper than fossil fuels wouldn’t solve it, right? Although, I’d be happy to be wrong there! Desalination does seem like a useful shiftable load that could incentivize over-building solar, which is always nice.
- HappyPanacea 1y ago> Desalination does seem like a useful shiftable load Yes this is a really nice feature, you can store excess water for essentially free. This probably shifts the economics of desalination to favor technologies that are more energy intensive but lower capex and opex.