

California is on the verge of water abundance - akkartik
http://waterfx.co/central-valley/solar-desalination

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DrScump
This article completely ignores the key problem: distribution
(transportation).

Your source material is the ocean. Your consumers are well inland. In
California, for example, you'd have to build a complete Eastbound set of
pipelines and distribution mechanisms... and do it across the coastal
mountains. Or, transport by roads, resulting in both added pollution and fatal
damage to your cost model.

Now, there would be localized useful cases, such as farms in the Watsonville
corridor and coastal municipal water districts, but there is no economy of
scale.

The most direct application would be a pipeline leading from the desalination
plant to the nearest point that you could feed water _into_ a major aquifer,
replenishing it.

~~~
amandell
Solar desalination is a form of "distributed generation" \- it bypasses the
need for large scale transportation by generating (reusing) water locally. The
source water can be the ocean if that is the local resource. Inland, the
source water is irrigation drainage (water leftover after irrigation). In
other locations the source water is brackish groundwater, wastewater, process
water or any other local impaired water source that can be converted to
freshwater using solar energy. In essence, desalination is a form of reuse -
every user of water can be a re-user.

A good analog for this is rooftop solar, another form of distributed
generation. Transporting electricity is bypassed by generating solar energy
locally (i.e. at your home). Scale is achieved by having thousands of small
generators instead of a small number of large power producers that distribute
electricity over long distances.

Net metering takes this concept further by leveraging the existing grid to
enhance distributed resources. Excess solar energy is distributed back to the
grid - users become providers. The same is true for water - large water users
(like farmers) who are connected to the water grid can reuse and generate
excess water that is redistributed through the existing water grid.

------
amandell
"We do not need to live with insufficient water – this is a temporary
condition that is curable, just like a treatable disease. Using clean energy
to produce clean water is like a vaccine, preventing and even reversing the
spread of water scarcity."

