It’s not -a lot- of electricity … a couple of thousand kWh per day. It’s also used to de-salinate ocean water … of which there’s plenty.
It’s not -a lot- of electricity … a couple of thousand kWh per day. It’s also used to de-salinate ocean water … of which there’s plenty.
It generates 880.000kWh/year, where I live that enough for 180 families (2 adults, 2 kids) with an average consumption in a house, and almost 350 in apartments. That’s not an insignificant amount IMO.
Doesn’t sound all that economical compared with other energy sources. It probably needs to be compared to longer-term energy storage solutions that don’t rely on geography like hot sand, the possibility to store the energy source (concentrated salt water) relatively cheaply is the most interesting part about it.
The upside is getting power from an otherwise waste-product. Yes it’s low output compared with traditional turbine-driven power plants, but that doesn’t mean in should be disregarded. Sure it’s not applicable everywhere, but neither is hydro or geothermal. After all, why not use the geography of your location to your benefit? Not everywhere needs to get power in the exact same way, and what’s most feasible is highly dependent on location.
Concentrated salt water might be a waste product, but the plant was built on purpose. How long does it need to operate before the costs amortisize? Even if we’re looking at greenhouse gases, most building materials aren’t exactly climate-friendly - concrete in particular is a huge emitter of greenhouse gases.
The people who designed built the plant probably calculated all this, but the article doesn’t go into it and with novel technologies like this, it’s generally not safe to just assume that a given plant makes any economical or environmental sense.
While I agree that the cost of operation and yield are a valid concern, the same argument could have been used against renewable energies like wind and solar only 30 to 40 years ago.
The price of these energie sources has come down a lot since, for a large part thanks to the modern day widespread use. We have a lot of experience generating power this way which drives down cost, and increases yield.
Novel techniques like the one described in the article don’t yet benefit from that experience and scale. And if we don’t try new things every now and then they never will.
That is not to say all novel techniques will be equally fruitful, but if you don’t occasionally try new things you will never learn.
Fair point.
It’s a pop science article… they usually don’t cover things like life cycle analysis. It is however a first of its kind plant that makes its net effects less important as it kind of works as a proof of concept. It’s a relatively small scale plant that if it does work, great, lets build more of them; if it doesn’t work, that sucks, can we modify them in any way to make them work.
It is taking two ingredients that usually have to take extra energy to be able to dispose of them and combining them together to make electricity. That is really cool, and there is no reason to be overly negative about it because it might be bad based on info that you don’t have
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