‘Two-faced’ membrane can create electricity from salty and fresh water

Re:‘Two-faced’ membrane can create electricity from salty an... by chongli on Saturday October 27, 2018 @11:57AM (#18316282)

20GW is basically nothing next to the environmental damage it would cause by destroying the Mississippi delta in order to build this plant. 20GW gives you 480,000 MWh/d. The US as a whole is currently using over 13,000,000 MWh/d [1]. There is only one Mississippi! Not worth it, if you ask me.

Besides, it's not just biofilms that are the problem. With a river you're going to have huge amounts of silt and very fine clay clogging up your membrane. The maintenance costs for an installation like this would be overwhelming.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/realtime_grid/#/summary/demand?end=20160...

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Re:‘Two-faced’ membrane can create electricity from salty an... by Retric on Saturday October 27, 2018 @12:06PM (#18316329)

There is far more than just one US river. Hudson for example is: 21,400 ft³/s, Potomac is 10,810 ft³/s etc.

And the output is just mild salinity water, so you could probably extract form 1/2 the flow without causing that much environmental harm as long as you pipe the output to an area with similar salinity.

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Re:‘Two-faced’ membrane can create electricity from salty an... by chongli on Saturday October 27, 2018 @04:07PM (#18317433)

It's not the salinity I'm worried about, it's the installation.

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Re:‘Two-faced’ membrane can create electricity from salty an... by kurthr on Sunday October 28, 2018 @10:49AM (#18320824)

Don't worry, it won't be installed and it's not practical. Also, the delta will be submerged by rising oceans soon enough so that won't be a worry either. :^(

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