MANY of the world’s remote areas with water shortages also have three things in abundance – sun, wind and sea.
How renewable energies can be harnessed more effectively in the future to transform salty seawater and brackish water into drinking water is the subject of a current study under the EU’s so-called ProDes initiative.
Worldwide, more and more people are getting their drinking water either from the sea or from increasingly salty inland sources through the process of desalination.
According to Global Water Intelligence, in 2008, desalination facilities around the world produced more than 54.5billion litres (nearly 12billion gallons) of water each day.
This amount is expected to more than double by the year 2016.
Most of this demand is because of Middle East requirements. Spain ranks fourth worldwide. Other European countries are increasingly turning to desalination as well, including France, Greece and Italy.
While most of the large desalination plants are fuelled by oil or gas, smaller and medium-sized plants can run partly, or even entirely, on renewable energies.
However, it turns out that the people in charge aren’t even aware of the opportunities they have to run plant purely on renewables, especially solar, but also wind and, one day perhaps, tidal energy plants.
ProDes stands for Promotion of Renewable Energy for Water Production through Desalination. The initiative has established an array of processes for desalinating seawater and brackish water.
Most major European desalination plants rely on reverse osmosis: High-pressure and semi-permeable membranes separate water from salt and unwanted organic constituents.
Not every plant is suited to every location, however. The best technology for the task depends on the salinity of untreated water, the local infrastructure and the quantity of water required.
The more remote the location, the more worthwhile and profitable it is to use plant systems which run on renewable energy, and to set up a water-treatment operation that is not dependent on an external energy supply.
Experimental solar-powered desalination plants have been installed on the Canary Islands of Gran Canaria and Tenerife.
The hope is that, under ProDes, the uptake of renewables to power desalination plant will become the norn rather than the exception.
The study can be found at the ProDes website (www.prodes-project.org). The website also offers information about activities such as its workshops and the initiative’s e-learning course.
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