Where’s the power going to come from? Taking salt out of seawater takes HUGE amounts of power.
I wonder what the economics of the plant would look like if they put the plant five miles inland, off the coast.
Also, I’ve read the highly saline water discharge is really harmful to aquatic life. The effluent outfall pipe has to be put FAR off offshore to avoid serious harm to aquatic life.
I am sure if they run one pinwheel on top, it will all be taken care of.
3.37 kWh per cubic meter for reverse osmosis is not huge.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10098-016-1190-3
For example, RO typically requires 3.37 kW h/m3 of energy for desalinating seawater, 1.2 kW h/m3 for industrial effluent, and 0.7–1 kW h/m3 for brackish water (Hoang et al. 2009). Modern seawater desalination plants incorporating RO usually employ an energy recovery device (ERD).
“Where’s the power going to come from? Taking salt out of seawater takes HUGE amounts of power.”
I assume that when some lists the costs of desalinized water, they’re including the cost of the energy involved.
Given that, and according to the article below (and plenty others), the cost comes out to 0.39 CENTS per gallon (well under a penny per gallon). Where I live in Texas, I pay between 1.5 and 2.0 CENTS per gallon, and we use about 4000 gallons per month. Given the cost listed below, another 0.40 CENTS per gallon would raise my water bill by $16 a month, at most (from $60 to $80 to $76 to $96). Yes it’s more, but I would GLADLY pay that to NOT have to be lectured about water use, told not to wash my car, told when to water my law, etc.
The REAL PROBLEM that the Left has with desalinization is that it uses SOME ENERGY, and even a relatively minuscule amount of energy is UNACCEPTABLE to them, since most of that energy is still carbon-based. So they bitch...don’t fall for their propaganda, do the math instead.
https://www.advisian.com/en/global-perspectives/the-cost-of-desalination
“Since the 1960s, the cost for Multi-Stage Flash Distillation (MSF) to desalinate water has decreased approximately by a factor of 10, with approximate unit costs of US$ 10.00/m3 in the 1960s to less than US$1.00/m3 ($3.79 per 1000 gallons)”