And now today Musk liked and replied to a desalination tweet.
3 kWh per m^3 of water is typical energy consumption for modern high-efficiency reverse osmosis plants. Any hypothetical new technologies couldn’t improve this by very much, considering that “For typical seawater at ambient temperature and 3.5% concentration by weight of dissolved salts, the universal thermodynamic limit (TL) to separate water from the solution (but at zero recovery) is
0.78 kWh per cubic meter, as given by the Gibbs equations
12,
13. However, the practical specific energy consumption for seawater desalination plants available hitherto may vary from 5- to 8-folds higher than the ideal limit.” (
Source: Nature)
However, as I’ve argued before, in a future of cheap solar energy, there would probably be less focus on desalination energy efficiency in order to save cost in other areas.
Humans currently use 4 trillion cubic meters of freshwater globally each year, and the long term trend has been for this number to rise. Unless there is a dramatic disruption of the agriculture industry in terms of irrigation, indoor farming, or people’s willingness to eat less animal food from conventional animal farms, then we simply need a lot of water. Getting 1 trillion m^3 from desal would require at least 1 PWh (petawatt-hour) of energy input at maximum thermodynamic efficiency. Real-world efficiency including pumping and transportation consumption, especially if the desal market switches from osmosis to distillation to exploit cheap energy, can easily exceed this by 10x or maybe even 50x. “The range of specific energy consumption (SEC) for MSF [multistage flash distillation] plants is typically 20 kWh–25 kWh per cubic meter of freshwater produced” (
source).
So, we can estimate that replacing a substantial fraction of current world water consumption with desal could burn on the order of 10-100 PWh of energy per year. In comparison, in the 2022 Impact Report Tesla estimated 84 PWh of total energy consumed in a sustainable energy economy based on the figure presented in MPP3
which did not include desal.
Furthermore, this is just accounting for possible human uses. Conceivably, I’m the future we might start to actively refill parched lakes and rivers. Does this sound far-fetched? Maybe, but this year Israel is
already starting to do it to maintain water levels in the Sea of Galilee. It’s still experimental and the first such project in the world, but it’s actually in operation right now and scientists are collecting data on how it’s impacting the ecosystem in the lake.
What else might have been omitted from the Master Plan?
) would have you plug into the vehicle ALDL connector and do a visual inspection. The State would collect the emissions monitor status and “other data” during the inspection. As a part time instructor for the smog program, my employer was one of several individuals that are part of the BAR testing program. He would elude to the premise that the state had access to parts of the vehicle program that indicated how many times the software was updated/ changed and had a pilot program to monitor the data and using license plate data could direct the vehicle to a roadside inspection station at a further date and time for further testing……..
