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The Future The World needs Salt
Free Water Wind
energy can deliver the answer, it is quite simple, the oceans and seas of the
World cover about 70 percent of the Earth's surface, and are made up of salt
water, all we have to do is extract the salt from the sea water, and we have all
the fresh water that we require, for drinking and agriculture. There are several
known ways to remove the salt of which Distillation ( the evaporation and then
condensing of water to obtain purified water ) and Reverse Osmosis ( by forcing
the salt water through a membrane to extract the salt ) are the most common
methods. Both use large amounts of electrical energy to be effective. The
simple answer is
to use a dedicated wind farm situated close to the ocean, to
provide the electrical energy, the ocean provides the water. The fresh water
produced is then stored in a reservoir, and pumped to where it is needed. One
of the problems with Wind energy is that it is not working all the time, and on
demand twenty four hours every day, but for water desalinization it is not
necessary that it be working on demand, it would be sufficient that it is
working three quarters of the time. With 365 days in a year, if it was working
270 days a year that would be acceptable.
The
constituents of seawater include dissolved inorganic substances such as salts.
Sodium and chloride ions predominate in seawater; together they form more than
85 percent by weight of the total amount of dissolved salts. The total salt
content may vary, because seawater can be diluted by additions of precipitation
in the form of rain or snow, fresh river water, or water from melting icebergs.
Seawater may become more saline in various parts of the world because of
natural evaporation of water. Throughout
the world, hundreds of desalination units, producing from a few thousand to
10,000,000 or more gallons per day, already are in operation. In general, the
desalination plants in production are in areas where the population has
outstripped the onshore water supply and where high-cost desalinated water can
be afforded. This situation tends to arise in coastal desert areas, or on
densely populated islands because the costs of pumping water through pipelines
to interior areas would add prohibitively to the basic cost, at the sites of
desalination, unless low cost renewable energy was used. A
population usually can afford to pay about ten times as much for water for
domestic purposes than it does for agricultural water. Proposals for large-scale
Wind Farm Generation facilities, when constructed, promise to lower the cost of
desalinated water to 10 cents to 30 cents per 1,000 gallons, at the desalination
sites, which is a price that all domestic users, most industries, and a few
agricultural enterprises can afford. At
the present time, the bulk of the water produced from seawater is produced by
some form of evaporation and condensation or by reverse osmosis. Although the
principle of this technique is quite simple, the mechanics of achieving high
efficiencies can become quite complicated. Superheated water and multiple
evaporation and condensation units, operating at varying temperatures and
pressures, are employed in a number of these facilities. The choice of
construction materials is quite important, because the brines produced in
extracting pure water can be corrosive. With the reverse osmosis, it is the
replacement and maintenance of the membranes. Other
processes under consideration as potential economic methods of desalting
seawater are freezing, ionic processes, electrodialysis, and techniques that
change the physical or chemical properties of water itself so that it can be
separated from the salts in seawater. In the future, it can be expected that the
ocean will become an increasingly important source of freshwater. If production
and transportation costs can be lowered sufficiently, it may be possible to
produce freshwater to irrigate
large areas of agricultural land in many parts of the world.
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