Japanese Power Plant Turns Saltwater Into Electricity
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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.
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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.
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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I sounds more like it makes electricity out of fresh water, destroying it in the process (turning it into saltwater through osmosis/dilution). Sure… if there is some crazy salty water you have, and want to turn it into “still salty, but maybe less so”, you can indeed gather a tiny little fraction of the power.
But given that fresh water is also a precious resource in many places, this seems relatively niche.
It can use treated waste water, so it's not that specialized.
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I sounds more like it makes electricity out of fresh water, destroying it in the process (turning it into saltwater through osmosis/dilution). Sure… if there is some crazy salty water you have, and want to turn it into “still salty, but maybe less so”, you can indeed gather a tiny little fraction of the power.
But given that fresh water is also a precious resource in many places, this seems relatively niche.
From what the article says, it's actually a pretty cool way of improving desalination plants. They use the left over brine, from desalination, that has a very high concentration of salt, and use it as the high salt concentration side, with regular seawater being used on the other side. This both gives them free energy and reduces the side effects of pumping that extremely salty water into the sea by diluting it.
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Right. So it's 100kW output, which is almost enough to pull the skin off a rice pudding. It also uses the brine from a desalination plant, so it's basically salinating fresh water to get some of the power back that was taken to desalinate it.
As a means of power production, it seems a bit pointless.
You should call up Japan and let them know how wrong they are.
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Combine salt and water to create electricity to power a desalination plant that removes salt from water. I am sure there is more to it, but the article sounds like it’s one of those mad perpetual free energy schemes that defy the laws of physics.
Isn’t efficiency just getting closer and closer to a perpetual machine? Using science and the physics to the absolute limit!
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I swear, nobody in this comment section actually understood the article.
New to the internet?
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Combine salt and water to create electricity to power a desalination plant that removes salt from water. I am sure there is more to it, but the article sounds like it’s one of those mad perpetual free energy schemes that defy the laws of physics.
They are just re-capturing some of the energy the system spent turning salt water into fresh. Because that results in extremely salty brine water waste, you can get some energy as it gets diluted back down to sea water concentration.
There no “new” energy in the system, it’s just wasting less.
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I don't think anyone claimed it was.
It’s the misleading “generated” electricity headline. It just re-captures some of the spent energy to be slightly more efficient.
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Right. So it's 100kW output, which is almost enough to pull the skin off a rice pudding. It also uses the brine from a desalination plant, so it's basically salinating fresh water to get some of the power back that was taken to desalinate it.
As a means of power production, it seems a bit pointless.
Its miles better than traditional desalination - requiring so much energy that burning fossil fuels is unavoidable. And brine is chucked back in the ocean. Basically an environmental catastrophe.
If you think of it on the scale of one community - providing potable water, dealing with treated wastewater AND getting a surplus of energy while treating the brine it is actually pretty clever.
If it makes you feel better you could probably slap some solar panels on those flat roofs too.
