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Comment by antonvs | Hacker News Reader

No.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-dont-we-get-o...

Article is outdated (2008) and makes a single argument: Desalination requires too much energy. Becaues it is outdated, it doesn't account for the excess energy a lot of places and countries have from wind and solar. Water desalination is a prime candidate (along with Bitcoin mining and AI model training, sigh) for using available excess energy from renewable that cannot be stored otherwise. Clean/drinking water can be stored easily - it is called a freshwater lake.

Not really - renewable curtailment and negative wholesale electricity prices happen but not frequently enough that you can generally afford to leave a capital intensive investment like a bitcoin mining setup, a water desalination plant or a hydrogen electrolyser idle 90% of the time waiting for cheap electricity.

And the market and technological developments (batteries) are actively working against this pricing anomaly - I can see the phenomena of negative pricing disappear completely in electricity markets in the next few years given the current explosion in grid battery deployment.

Might be true in the US, but here in Europe we see this quite often. Prices don't have to be negative, it is enough if they are cheap (we pay for water too). And in some locations there are already projects like this [0] where they built a hydro-electric pump station with a dam for storage plus a desalination plant that fills the reservoir from seawater in one location.

[0]: https://www.ree.es/en/ecological-transition/storage

The UK also doesn't have enough power, well not enough to do whats needed for desalination.

It would be _vastly_ cheaper and easier to build reservoirs.

Build new power plants genius

congratulations, you now have 8x the debt, breaks the legal requirements for decarbonising the grid, diverts money away from uprading the grid from where its needed, and pisses off the most of the locals. Then you discover that all your fresh water is by the coast, so you now also need to build huge water moving infrastructure.

you might as well just do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Contour_Canal and spend the rest of the money building homes.

Nuclear power plants is the answer

I don't see how the contents justify a hard "No". Even before factoring in that the article was written 17 years ago.

> It can cost from just under $1 to well over $2 to produce one cubic meter (264 gallons) of desalted water from the ocean. That's about as much as two people in the U.S. typically go through in a day at home.

Uhhhh that seems pretty cheap and affordable?

It's not private homes that are at risk. Agriculture and industry use up the most water and they absolutely do not want to pay.

...the article says otherwise, that we can, do, and increasingly will.

> can cost from just under $1 to well over $2 to produce one cubic meter (264 gallons) of desalted water from the ocean. That's about as much as two people in the U.S. typically go through in a day at home.

What am I missing here? Even if you triple the cost, people will pay a $180 water bill before living in a water scarcity situation.

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