Relatively high energy cost since you’re undoing an endothermic reaction, you need to do a lot of it since we use water in large quantities… but most of all, the planet naturally does a lot of desalination for us already through various geological processes, so our “price point” for desalination is $0 per liter (infrastructure to capture rain, dam rivers, or tap groundwater isn’t literally free, but it’s pretty close - especially when it comes to the marginal cost for the next liter). It’s not difficult to desalinate per se, it’s difficult to desalinate extremely cheaply and at huge scale.
In 2022, 85% of the country's drinkable water was produced through desalination of saltwater and brackish water. If there is a real need, and a will to address it, we have everything we need to to it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...
OK, so we got a country that needs machines to survive (no desalination plant, no water to drink).
Maybe it's time to understand that it's not a long term strategy ? That may be they should move to another place where water is naturally more abundant ?
It's not even remotely economical without huge government subsidies. Completely untenable with current technology for poorer countries, or anyone that cares at all about carbon emissions.
>Why must drinking water be a for-profit enterprise?
It's about sustainability, not profit. Of course wealthy nations can (literally) burn enough money turning fossil fuels into water to make their population comfortable and happy. But most can't, and the externalized cost is unimaginable at a global scale.
Wind powered desalination seems like a perfect combo seeing as it's pretty much always windy on the coast. California's May gray and June gloom makes me thing would keep solar from my first option.
>Clean energy exists, it would require more subsidies but so what?
Easy to say when your government can afford the subsidies. But the vast majority of freshwater-insecure nations will never be able to do this without a 10x technological breakthrough.
> Well if they can't afford to even subsidize fresh water, their choices are move or die.
Would you tell that to the Israelis if they couldn't afford it?
The point is that yes, the original article is correct. Current desalination tech is woefully inadequate to replace fresh water surface reserves without putting a massive burden on the society using it.
> Would you tell that to the Israelis if they couldn't afford it?
Yes? What else would I tell them, to pray for a miracle? If they don't have enough water, can't get water profitably and cannot even afford to subsidize water, what else is there to do besides find somewhere new to live? What would you tell them?
> without putting a massive burden on the society using it.
Yeah, in some places it will be necessary to subsidize water, placing a burden on society. But considering we're talking about water, that's obviously a burden that needs to be borne. Acquisition of water comes before literally anything else a population might want to spend money on. And if there isn't enough money around to acquire sufficient quantities of water, there isn't enough money to live there at all.
Israel has a strong enough economy, they can afford to make desalination work for them. You objected that they have to subsidize the desalination, but I don't see any sense in that objection. If that's what they need to do, that's what they'll do.
Some parts of the US have too much fresh water, other parts have too little. Fresh water is a regional matter; you're talking about the American Southwest, particularly California, specifically. But this conversation is about desalination generally, and particularly Israel.
Why not use nuclear power plants to power desalination plants? I even wonder if some of the salt from the brine could be fed into certain types of nuclear reactors (Molten Salt Reactors and the like, possibly) making it an even more symbiotic relationship
Massive-scale desalination with nuclear has been proposed for decades by many nations. Here's a proposal (originally pushed by JFK) for using them to transform the Middle East into a luscious mecca, thereby solving any arable land scarcity issues (from 1967)
Is there a practical reason why it would be difficult to do this with solar power? Is this a process that does not adapt well to intermittent power sources?
I feel like I never get enough of the operational details to know. But intermittently running a capital intensive thing has bad economics. If the capital cost per m3 is $0.50 when the plant runs 24/7. It'll be $2.0/m3 if you cut it back to 6 hours a day.
However the details are important. You'd need to do a deep operations analysis to get an answer. That also would include energy storage as well.
One of desalination facilities I think is actually solar powered. It mix of evaporative desalination with power generation (giant tower that a bunch of mirrors focus light one). Not sure if it's in production now.
But in general in Israel solar has a couple of problems: very dusty (sand storms) and local electrical company which tends to create problems
This doesn’t make sense to me. You don’t need to store energy to desalinate water. You can store the final product. And water storage is a solved problem. At times where supply exceeds demand, use excess energy to desalinate more water. When energy demand is high, desalinate less.
I wasn't too clear about what I meant, but is storage even necessary here? For example, would there be an issue if the desalination process was left in an intermediate state for X hours / days while power is intermittent?
I wonder if there are more energy-expensive desalinization processes that are better to use with intermittent power sources, like solar.
desalination plants are built to produce specific amount of water in order to cope with demand. if you going to stop desalinating while there is no solar, you need more plants in order to desalinate more water during the day. also, in general, even during day, solar not always available.
Sure. So if for example your city has an average of 3400 hours of sun per year like Jerusalem does, and you know how much water you need to produce in the 8760 hours of the year, you can calculate how much to desalinate during sunny hours. Excesses can be used for excess water or sold back to the grid.
desalination plants don't serve one city. they serve country. also, in general, it's not economical to build plants that do not work 24/7 unless you are country that can spend x3 to overbuild and keep equipment idle
Israel btw supplies desalinated water to Jordan and PA.
I think we’re talking past one another. Solar is definitely economical in certain circumstances, and every country overbuilds to some extent. Whether building excess solar makes sense is a question of cost of a marginal unit of energy, since the water doesn’t care what powered its desalination. The energy isn’t wasted since it will eventually need to come from somewhere.
Another consideration is political sovereignty, since solar can’t easily be turned off by a foreign adversary.
Note that the large increase in the graph predates seawater desalinization. If you start at 2005 (first large seawater desalinization facility per wiki) and assume all the increase is due to desalinization (definitely untrue, but simplifying), the difference isn't so large.
A lot of public goods are that way. What you’ve stated is practically a tautology. “Government subsidy” just means the public is paying for it. Other things that fall into that category are universal education, the military, and police.
Fresh water isnt a "public good", technically or economically speaking. A "public good" is a commodity that is neither rival or excludable. This means that the quanity or quanity is not deminished by people using it, and that you cant prevent anyone from using it. A lighthouse or public radio are examples of public goods.
Fresh water, economically speaking, is a classic private good. It gets consumed as someone uses it, and can people can be easily restricted from acess if they dont pay.
on a serious note, it's a smallish research/etc facility. probably most of things are as deep underground as possible. it's not same thing as full blown nuclear power plant
