Cheap desalination without a power hookup, without even batteries, produces drinkable water.
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Cheap desalination without a power hookup, without even batteries, produces drinkable water.
A "shipping container" sized unit, again with no power, no batteries....
"On average, it desalinated around 5,000 liters of water per day—enough for a community of roughly 2,000 people."
"Cheap as tap water"
This is good news. Very good news.
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@kevinrns can't wait to not hear anything about this after about one year
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@chfour The team needs a White Saviour who could help sell the system to a bunch of rich white men seeking white saviours to fund for delivery to random sites in the Global South.
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It is cheap enough to build by anyone, cheap water is produced cheaply. Its just design. No expensive parts.
I do not understand how your comment relates to these facts.
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@kevinrns Its primary target market is clearly the parts of the world where poverty is common.
The catch is, markets behave ... differently ... in such places, and a very common failure mode of start-ups working on important problems, only for their solutions to not get widely adopted, is not taking these differences into account. Sometimes in the design phase; sometimes, in the selling phase.
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It doesn't have a market, its a research project. Los Angeles would love cheaper water, California too. Because of global warming, fresh water is badly distributed and hard to capture.
Build sun and wind and desalination.
The two linked articles are worth reading. Really.
Completing a difficult global task without requiring energy hook up or battery is a universal good.
Its a research project. It works.
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@kevinrns You didn't read the article.
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I don't understand the need to try and find things to object to.
It requires no hook up, you put the dam thing on the beach.
Unlike for example, AI, which has no purpose globally, oh so damn globally, and it needs multiple nuke power stations to do nothing. Stupidly.
So throwing poopoo on energy free desalination seems like goofy, still, even now, a dozen comments later.
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@kevinrns This is not an "energy-free desalination" system. It's a control system that fixes a bottleneck on energy conversion in situations in which energy availability is unsteady. It doesn't provide a new method for removing salt from water, only a new method for controlling an old process in a way that makes it wieldier to use in small villages not connected to a reliable power grid.
It doesn't add anything significant in situations where reliable electricity is readily available.
This is a solution specifically geared for communities that do not have solid infrastructure. It seems well-designed to me, at least in comparison to the typical White Saviour stuff, but an important problem in selling it is, it's not needed by most people who are rich enough to be able to afford it for themselves, and selling these things to people who need to get the money from an aid programme is hard. Really. It is.
Paradoxically, one of the hardnesses is, international development aid programmes often suffer from expecting White Saviour Projects, and this device doesn't seem like it would easily pass as one. So, the people who thought it up may need to find a professional charlatan to sell their useful device as a silly thing just so that it could actually reach people who need it.
