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.

 

For More Information Contact:

Ettridge Wind Turbine Pty. Ltd.
53 Branksome Terrace, Dover Gardens, South Australia.5048.
Tel: 61-8-82981698
FAX: 61-8-82989080
Internet: md@ettridgewindturbine.com