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It's 2024 and drought is optional

asteriskmag.com

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Re: It's 2024 and drought is optional

#31

Post by skybrian »

This article is quite long-winded, but to summarize, they are proposing a desalination scheme assuming cheap solar energy.

Given that California electricity is pretty expensive even though we have lots of solar energy, how can that be done? Why not sell it to the grid?

It might help to know that the author of the article is the founder of Terraform Industries, which aims to use solar power to synthesize natural gas. Likely the hope is to get efficiency by closely integrating the solar panels with the desalination plant, similar to how they do it in that project.

I think if they really can get cheap desalination, there are many cities that would buy the water and pay more than agriculture. It wouldn't make sense to tackle agricultural use first, since it's more price-sensitive.

Re: It's 2024 and drought is optional

#32

Post by mapt »

skybrian wrote: post #31

This article is quite long-winded, but to summarize, they are proposing a desalination scheme assuming cheap solar energy. Given that California electricity is pretty expensive even though we have lots of solar energy, how can that be done? Why not sell it to the grid? It might help to know that the author of the article is the founder of Terraform Industries, which aims to use solar power to synthesize natural gas.…

We got cheap desalination, supposedly - https://humanprogress.org/desalinating-water-is-becoming-abs...

Re: It's 2024 and drought is optional

#33

Post by defrost »

worik wrote: post #29

> Last year, the world installed about 437 GW of solar electricity, or roughly one acre of panels every 10 seconds How can that be true. That's over three million acres. Really?

Sounds about right assuming the global solar installation figures are ballpark correct. (See World in data [1], etc).

We've gone from ~200 GW installed per year to ~400 GW per year.

The India mega solar farm [2] is quoted as designed to deliver 30 GW from 72,600 hectares (179,398.5 acres).

Sanity checking ( 437 / 30 ) x 179,398 gives 2.6 million acres.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gujarat_Hybrid_Renewable_Energ...

Re: It's 2024 and drought is optional

#34

Post by mapt »

jaggederest wrote: post #19
viburnum wrote: post #17

Leftover brine is really a problem though https://www.wired.com/story/desalination-is-booming-but-what...

Yeah I don't think you can just dump it in the top end of the gulf of california, especially if that's where you're sourcing feedwater.

Why not?

Existing ocean currents in the Gulf of California driven by wind, tides, and thermohaline circulation are on the order of 10cm/s, tens of kilometers wide, hundreds of meters deep. Very little of that is associated with local rivers, which are relatively tiny because the whole region is extremely arid. Are you going to be desalinating 0.1 km^2 of water per second?

The Sun pumps a thousand watts a square meter onto the surface of the Earth on a 24-hour cycle and this tends to shake things up.

Re: It's 2024 and drought is optional

#35

Post by epistasis »

skybrian wrote: post #31

This article is quite long-winded, but to summarize, they are proposing a desalination scheme assuming cheap solar energy. Given that California electricity is pretty expensive even though we have lots of solar energy, how can that be done? Why not sell it to the grid? It might help to know that the author of the article is the founder of Terraform Industries, which aims to use solar power to synthesize natural gas.…

> Given that California electricity is pretty expensive even though we have lots of solar energy, how can that be done? Why not sell it to the grid?

Look at wholesale prices of electricity on the grid, and it's really small.

High prices in California are due to PG&E not maintaining the grid and causing massive amounts of damages, which everybody else pays for. Or something. It's really hard to find out why our transmission and distribution prices are so high. And for that matter, generation costs on bills are super high despite people usually getting much cheaper generation prices if they have a Community Choice option that procures their own renewable generation.

In any case, if the desalination project was funded by their own off grid generation they'd have really cheap electricity.

Re: It's 2024 and drought is optional

#36

Post by ahstilde »

SllX wrote: post #26
Retric wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gives Southern California including LA a listing as a single supercity population 24.4 million which is close but not quite there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_megalopolises

That’s a goddamned stretch if ever there was one. SoCal is more or less a recognizable region in California, and does indeed have almost 24M people, but nobody sane would call it a megalopolis without some weird agenda I can’t quite figure out. Los Angeles is a city of about 3.9M. LA County is well, apparently experiencing some population decline because last I checked this was a little over 11M, but apparently as of…

> A megalopolis (/ˌmɛɡəˈlɒpəlɪs/) or a supercity,[1] also called a megaregion,[2] is a group of metropolitan areas which are perceived as a continuous urban area through common systems of transport, economy, resources, ecology, and so on.[2] They are integrated enough that coordinating policy is valuable, although the constituent metropolises keep their individual identities.[2]

2 hours driving, in the US, is a natural distance for complementary but distinct cities to form. NYC/Philly/DC, SF/San Jose, LA/SD.

Megapolis is the correct term.

Re: It's 2024 and drought is optional

#37

Post by zdragnar »

worik wrote: post #29

> Last year, the world installed about 437 GW of solar electricity, or roughly one acre of panels every 10 seconds How can that be true. That's over three million acres. Really?

There was a four thousand acre solar panel setup in Texas that was demolished by a hail storm a month ago.

Despite the "everything in Texas is bigger" motto, worldwide 3 million doesn't sound too far fetched if a single install in Texas is already 4,000 acres.

Re: It's 2024 and drought is optional

#39

Post by epistasis »

worik wrote: post #29

> Last year, the world installed about 437 GW of solar electricity, or roughly one acre of panels every 10 seconds How can that be true. That's over three million acres. Really?

The 437GW is accurate, but depending on how you measure the "acres" the MW/acre figures seems fairly low, they may be counting a lot of empty space on parcels that are not actually devoted to solar panels. Using estimates from Fig4 here, I'd expect roughly half as many acres as that to be occupied by actual solar panels:

https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2022-01/lbnl_ieee...

Re: It's 2024 and drought is optional

#40

Post by epistasis »

zdragnar wrote: post #37
worik wrote: post #29

> Last year, the world installed about 437 GW of solar electricity, or roughly one acre of panels every 10 seconds How can that be true. That's over three million acres. Really?

There was a four thousand acre solar panel setup in Texas that was demolished by a hail storm a month ago. Despite the "everything in Texas is bigger" motto, worldwide 3 million doesn't sound too far fetched if a single install in Texas is already 4,000 acres.

That's surprising, I've seen lots of photos of solar farms post hail storm where there was minimal damage. Perhaps the hail is bigger in Texas (at least for that storm).
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