Re:California Is Sitting on the Solution to Its Drought Problem
by danmaz74 on Thursday June 18, 2015 @01:30PM
(#9740261)
I respect your opinion, but let me reiterate my two main points:
1. Storing rainwater (underground, with very little evaporation) is much more energy efficient than desalination. Could this alone fix all the problems of water supply even just for cities? Maybe not, but what it can do, it can do very efficiently. Even if it's not at all cheap and easy: I didn't run the numbers, but I'm pretty sure that building that kind of distributed storage capacity is much more expensive upfront than building an "equivalent" desalination plant. The difference is that the desalination plant will burn energy forever, while the water storage will use much, much, much less. Even if the historical average were say half the 14 inches quoted in the article, you would "just" need to cover a bigger catchment area.
2. We don't have infinite resources, and we can only build so much electrical power capacity from solar every year. As long as most of the electrical power generation emits CO2 (and worse), the more electrical power you use for desalination, the more CO2 you're going to emit.
1. Storing rainwater (underground, with very little evaporation) is much more energy efficient than desalination. Could this alone fix all the problems of water supply even just for cities? Maybe not, but what it can do, it can do very efficiently. Even if it's not at all cheap and easy: I didn't run the numbers, but I'm pretty sure that building that kind of distributed storage capacity is much more expensive upfront than building an "equivalent" desalination plant. The difference is that the desalination plant will burn energy forever, while the water storage will use much, much, much less. Even if the historical average were say half the 14 inches quoted in the article, you would "just" need to cover a bigger catchment area.
2. We don't have infinite resources, and we can only build so much electrical power capacity from solar every year. As long as most of the electrical power generation emits CO2 (and worse), the more electrical power you use for desalination, the more CO2 you're going to emit.