By Dina Spector 11 hours ago
Posted on 03/12/2014 8:25:27 PM PDT by ckilmer
WaterFX
A parabolic trough collects energy from the sun. The heat is used to evaporate clean water from the salty agricultural drainage water of irrigated crops.
This year, farmers in California's Central Valley likely won't receive any water through the federal irrigation program, a network of reservoirs, rivers, and canals that is normally replenished yearly by ice melt from the Sierra mountains.
Crippling water shortages have made desalination technology more attractive, including a startup, WaterFX, that uses the sun to produce heat. The heat separates salt and water through evaporation.
WaterFX has fewer environmental repercussions than traditional methods of desalination that rely on fossil fuels to generate electricity.
The technology could not have come at a better time.
No end in sight
During a drought-free year, the federally run Central Valley Project provides enough water to irrigate 3 million acres of agricultural land. Last year, farmers only received 20% of their allotment.
The lack of water is not just worrying for growers. It affects all people who eat food. One third of the nation's produce is grown in the Central Valley — composed of Sacramento Valley in the north and San Joaquin Valley in the south — and the deep water cuts mean that more than half a million acres of crop land will be left unplanted.
Some scientists predict California's drought could last as long as a century . Going forward, the state is going to need a substantial water supply that doesn't rely on the aqueduct system, says Aaron Mandell, WaterFX chairman and founder.
However, in order to counter California's drought, the push must be toward renewable desalination plants rather than fossil-fuel dependent facilities that further contribute to climate change.
Making freshwater from sunshine
In WaterFX's system, a solar trough, which looks like a jumbo-sized curved mirror, collects energy from the sun's rays and transfers that heat to a pipe filled with mineral oil. The mineral oil feeds the heat into a system that evaporates the salty water being treated. Steam is produced, which condenses into pure liquid water. The remaining salt solidifies and can be removed, says Mandell. That salts can be used in other industries as building materials, metals, or fertilizers.
In order to operate continuously, the solar trough is very large so that it collects extra heat during the day. The energy is stored and used to run the system at night when the sun isn't shining.
By using sun as the fuel source, WaterFX uses roughly one-fifth of the electricity consumed by traditional desalination plants, according to Mandell. Less electricity means lower operating costs. With conventional desalination, electricity makes up 50-60% of the water costs, says Mandell. A typical desalination plant in San Diego operates at about $900 per acre-foot, while it costs around $450 to produce an acre-foot of water with WaterFX. (An acre-foot is 325,000 gallons, or the amount of water it takes to cover an acre at a depth of one foot).
WaterFX
WaterFX chairman and founder, Aaron Mandell.
"Solar desalination is still a very immature technology so there's a quite a bit of room to drive that cost down even further," said Mandell.
Many desalination facilities, including the $1 billion Carlsbad plant set to open in 2016, use a process known as reverse osmosis that forces seawater through billions of tiny holes that filter out salt and other impurities. This method can produce fresh water on a large scale, but has economic and environmental drawbacks. It uses an immense amount of electricity and only about half of the seawater that goes into the system comes out as clean water. The remaining half is dumped back into the ocean as salty brine where it can be harmful to marine plants and animals.
By contrast, Mandell says that WaterFX has a 93% recovery rate, meaning that for every 100 gallons of water that goes in, 93 gallons of usable water are spit out.
WaterFX also helps solve an issue that has long plagued irrigated land. Soils in the arid west of San Joaquin Valley naturally contain a lot of salt as well as high concentrations of metals, like selenium, which can be toxic to humans and wildlife. When the soil is irrigated, the salt, selenium, and other elements become concentrated in the drainage water that collects in a system of drains and pumps under the crops. In the past, harmful drainage water might have been discharged into rivers, wetlands, and aquifers in the San Joaquin Valley. Now, that otherwise unusable water can be diverted to WaterFX and turned into irrigation water again.
The first test
The Panoche Water District in Central Valley is home to the first demonstration plant, a 6,500-square foot system that is capable of producing around 10 gallons of freshwater a minute, or roughly 14,000 of freshwater each day.
When the demonstration plant is operating in commercial mode, running 24 hours a day, it can put out 25 to 30 gallons of freshwater a minute, says Mandell.
WaterFX
The pilot project, funded by the California Department of Water Resources, will hopefully prove that the WaterFX system is more reliable (it doesn't depend on the Sierra snowpack) and affordable than other freshwater sources.
The water that's being treated by the pilot plant streams in from a canal that collects salty drainage water from around 200 farms in the area and brings it to a single location. In the pilot phase, the clean water that's produced is blended back in with the drainage water, but a commercial plant would send the water back to farmers through a series of canals that are already in place.
Additionally, small-scale systems could be used by individual farmers on site to recycle their own drainage water.
A bright future
WaterFX is not the first company to experiment with solar desalination. The Sahara Forest project in Qatar and an Australian company called Sundrop Farms are using the technology to grow food in greenhouses. But this is the first time a company has focused on using the sun's energy "to produce a scalable, long-term water supply," Mandell said.
The goal is to eventually be able to treat salty groundwater in addition to drainage water.
The immediate next step for WaterFX is to expand operations in Panoche to produce 2 million gallons of water per day. "From there it's about laying out a pathway for replicating this model all up and down the Central Valley," Mandell said. "We're trying to put a plan in place so that by 2020, we may be in a position to wean ourselves off the aqueduct system entirely."
| people would have done it by now. |
Now, this is a SOLAR plant, right?
.....
It doesn’t look like they’re converting solar power to electricity. Rather they’re heating a molton salt solution that vaporizes salt water. The steam is goes through a condenser and comes out as fresh water.
There’s a link up thread — to a sundrop farms green house project in Australia that uses solar thermal to desalinate water and heat green houses.
“Now, this is a SOLAR plant, right? “
If that’s really true, why is there a Natural Gas regulator and gas train attached to the equipment?
................
If you read the articles and view the video of the sundrop farms green house experiment in australia, you’ll notice that they also have a back up oil generator. For times when the sun don’t shine.
Its not a complete solution as yet and won’t be until the gas/oil generators are no longer needed.
Corn needs about 1 acre foot of water to grow properly. Of course this is all dependent on soil type and environment and wind and temperature. If you can grow 150 bushels of corn under ideal conditions you are looking at $3.33 dollars of expense per bushel of corn in water that is produced by this method. This puts corn out of the question as a crop to be grown using this method of water production. The point is that this method is only viable for high value crops that need much less water.
I am not against this method of water production but one must always remember what it costs to do it, and what can you sell your crop for.
If you want to know how to utilize limited water resources in agriculture, go to Israel. They have little water and use what they have to the absolute max efficiency.
Huh? I'm not at all sure it's viable either. However, I will say this: at least there's no doubt that hot fusion exists. But anybody who says that fusion of any kind is a serious answer to California's near term water woes is delusional.
Interesting position. We should start a LFTR vs. LENR thread. But how do you stop all the skeptopaths from showing up? The simple fact is, the mods here are not educated enough in energy technology to handle such a thread. It would be needed to be done elsewhere.
It’s the bomb.
Even worse the reproducibility of this stuff is fitful at best. Nobody’s been able to come up with a consistent cold fusor, or even a theory why they can’t come up with a consistent cold fusor. We’re back at the level of alchemy, if even that good. Maybe someone didn’t arrange the chicken entrails the right way the previous night at dinner? I am facetious on purpose, but a science this ain’t. Yet.
Another obama pipe dream hoax.
“a 6,500-square foot system that is capable of producing around 10 gallons of freshwater a minute, or roughly 14,000 of freshwater each day.”
The above figure assumes the sun is shinning 23 hours a day: in reality solar only works well for about 8 hours a day. So, in reality, it’s going to take about a 20,000 square foot unit for 14,000 gallons a day. For an acre foot of water per day then, it will take a 47,000 square foot system.
The Carlsbad plant will produce 46,000 acre feet per day, which means the solar system will require 2,162,000,000 square feet of installation of panels, or 274 square miles of solar panels to equal the $1 billion Carlsbad plant. Anybody want to guess how many trillions of dollars it would cost to build 274 square miles of solar panels?
near term water woes
***Agreed. I’m talking longer term. Of course, for the last 150 years or so, California’s biggest political battles have been over water.
My favorite plan was to dam up the SF bay.
http://www.amazon.com/Simulation-Similarity-Understand-Studies-Philosophy/dp/0199933669
| How many times has the F-P Anomalous Heat Effect been replicated? |
Great if it is affordable. But I predict some three striped mud snail will be found in a runoff ditch and the enirostatists will shut it down.
We have 50 year old technology called nuclear power. We also have thousands of years old called reservoirs and canals.
“An average of 14 cells”
out of what... what does the statistical distribution actually look like...
At best, it looks like some maddeningly un-pin-downable thing. I’d say why not, out of the contents of every cell or whatever, save a pre-reaction sample. If it looks like it reacted, then analyze the sample. Or how about putting the samples of the successful cells together, and then you should get near 100% reliable reaction? It ain’t rocket science. But it does look like farting around.
As opposed too...?
It’s about thousands of experiments going from 45% reproducibility to 85% in 5 years. And others have gotten 100% reproducibility since this report.
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/library/2004/2004Krivit-The2004ColdFusionReport.pdf
Page 48.
“An average of 14 cells”
out of what...
***Dolly the Sheep was loudly proclaimed as a success and that was 1 out of more than 100,000 failures. LENR is past the 50% reproducibility mark and FReepers act as if that’s somehow scientifically invalid.
I think they did prove genetically that Dolly was what Dolly was claimed. That counted for a lot. You get heat. Heat from what? Artifact of processing the powder?
If some people are getting it near perfect that’s where the cutting edge research is. Wonderful. Everybody else ought to be imitating them.
Something needs to rule out physico-chemical effects though.
You get far, far more heat than can be accounted for by adding Deuterium gas to Palladium, or H1 atomic gas to Nickel. Like 3 or 4 orders of magnitude more heat. So all of this focus on error bars of 1% or milliwatts is a bunch of horse manure when the heat measured is ten thousand times more than that.
Eventually, that will be the case. But when you spend your time hunting big game, you tend to ignore rabbits.
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