Desal is all about cheap energy.
The latest plants are coupled with clean coal and solar energy. You make the Desal plant highly efficient by using energy recapturing technology, use the water to cool the plants, and throw in waste water recovery plant that produces energy. You have millions of gallons of potable water, with a low carbon footprint that will produce thousands of megawatts of energy. Plus the waste water treatment plant would add to the potable water supply and feed power into the output of the plants.
What I thought of was Desal water, water treatment and energy production. Where the sum of the parts are much greater than the whole.
Almost all new Desal plants are using two or three pieces of the puzzle above.
“Desal is all about cheap energy.”
Well, here’s the energy picture from one of the most recent Desal Plants down near San Diego. Maybe you have a future working to make their plant better. BTW, not a lot of “clean coal” here in CA, and you’d have to cover a lot of ground with today’s solar technology to get 38MW. According to the article, Desal doubles the cost of a gallon of water today.
“In Carlsbad, two gallons of seawater will be needed to produce each gallon of drinking water. And to remove the salt, the plant will use an enormous amount of energy — about 38 megawatts, enough to power 28,500 homes — to force 100 million gallons of seawater a day through a series of filters. The process, known as reverse osmosis, removes salt and other impurities by blasting the water at six times the pressure of a fire hose through membranes with microscopic holes.”