The GivePower non-profit founded by Tesla subsidiary SolarCity is supplying solar-powered desalination systems to some of the world’s neediest communities, backed by Tesla’s Powerwall battery technology. It is elaborated on in A new solar desalination system to address water scarcity by JEAN HAGGERTY.
FEBRUARY 6, 2020
One of GivePower’s desalination projects. Image: GivePower
GivePower is launching containerized, solar-powered water desalination and purification plants in Mombasa, Kenya and La Gonave, Haiti this quarter. Like GivePower’s debut solar-powered microgrid desalination plant, which went live in Kiunga, Kenya in 2018, these new projects will operate with Tesla’s powerwall battery storage technology.
At launch, both of the nonprofit’s new solar water farm projects will produce a maximum of 75,000 liters of water a day by coupling a 50-kW solar system with 120 kW-hrs of Tesla batteries; together this solar plus battery system will power two low-wattage, reverse osmosis desalination pumps that run simultaneously to ensure continuous operation.
When developing solar-powered desalination projects, pinning down the point at which the technology and the operating model make economic sense is key because the one of the biggest challenges with solar desalination is the amount of energy that it takes to desalinate sea water. Often, this outsized energy need means that a plant requires a larger solar array, which increases the cost of the project.
“We need to see that [these philanthropic] projects are economically viable – that these projects can continue to operate without ongoing funding from donors to keep the systems operational,” said Kyle Stephan, GivePower’s vice president of operations. In addition to building solar water farms, GivePower trains local technicians to operate the plants.
GivePower’s solar water farm systems cost just over $500,000, and they have a 20-year expected lifespan.
Commercial applications for GivePower’s solar water farm technology are not in the pipeline currently, according to Hayes Barnard, CEO of GivePower.
When it comes to developing commercial off-grid, solar-powered desalination systems for water-stressed communities, industry officials see solar microgrid players as particularly well placed to offer solutions.
Drought, saltwater intrusion and climate change are intensifying the need for solutions that use renewable energy to address water scarcity. Simultaneously, falling PV prices and energy storage innovations are making solar-powered desalination solutions more appealing.
So far, all of GivePower’s solar water farms are coastal well-based desalination plants. This is because 98% of the world’s water is in the ocean, and 73% of the world’s population live in coastal areas, where well water is susceptible to becoming brackish, Barnard noted. Additionally, off-coast solar desalination plants’ intake processes are expensive, and coastal well-based solar water farms do not stress underground aquifers.
For its project on La Gonave, which is off the coast of Port-au-Prince, GivePower is applying international building code seismic requirements for its solar water farm’s concrete foundation, and it is building a solar canopy that is capable of withstanding a category-four hurricane.
Initially, the nonprofit focused on providing solar-powered lighting to schools without electricity in the hope that this would open up educational opportunities for girls in developing countries. But quickly it became clear that helping communities achieve water security was key to addressing this issue because often girls were often missing school because their days were spent fetching water, according to Barnard, a GivePower co-founder. GivePower became an independent organization in 2016.
Last week GivePower’s solar-powered desalination technology received the UAE’s Global Water Impact Award for innovative small projects.
The 4th International Rain Enhancement Forum (IREF) that brought together leading experts, scientists and researchers from all over the world was held in Abu Dhabi this past week. It was about the latest research and innovation in rain enhancement science together with possible collaborations to address the challenge of global water stress. The Future direction of rain enhancement research reviewed was reported on by all local media.
Emirates News Agency (WAM) — 25 January 2020
The UAE Research Program for Rain Enhancement Science, UAEREP, hosted a workshop to update its solicitation document, which will define the future calls for research proposal submissions. The workshop built on the productive discussions that took place during the 4th International Rain Enhancement Forum and its various plenary sessions.
UAEREP organised the 4th International Rain Enhancement Forum from 19 to 21 January 2020 under the supervision of the National Center of Meteorology. The event convened prominent national and international experts, researchers, scientists, and stakeholders to highlight the latest scientific and technological advancements in rain enhancement.
The full-day event brought together leading scientists and experts in atmospheric research and technologies, and centered around two main themes: ‘Cloud to Ground Science: Identifying Knowledge Gaps’ and ‘New Approaches and Technologies for Rain Enhancement’.
The session opened with a welcome speech by Alya Al Mazroui, Director of UAEREP, who outlined the programme’s purpose and ambitions.
Alya Al Mazroui said: “This workshop follows the successful fourth edition of the International Rain Enhancement Forum and the productive discussions we had over the course of the three days of intensive sessions and the Town Hall Meeting. The workshop is crucially important for our call for new research proposals and the shaping of the future direction of UAEREP’s research objectives.”
She added: “As we move forward with our efforts to enhance collaboration and seek viable solutions for global water stress, it is essential to build stakeholder consensus around our research goals and priorities to ensure the relevance and quality of proposals for the future of the our research program.”
Al Mazroui also revealed that the content of the new solicitation document will be shared publicly in mid-2020 as part of the call for research proposal submissions for the Program’s 4th cycle starting in 2021.
Participants at the workshop were provided with a detailed overview of UAEREP’s previous solicitation and management plan and the workshop structure by Dr. Richard Behnke, chair of UAEREP’s international reviewers committee.
In his presentation, Dr. Deon Terblanche, Weather and Climate Consultant at World Bank and former Director of Research at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), highlighted the achievements and challenges of past UAEREP awardees, and the latest advances in precipitation enhancement research.
Dr. Deon Terblanche also chaired a session titled ‘Cloud to Ground Science: Identifying Knowledge Gaps’, covering key topics such as quantifying the evaporative loss between cloud-base and the surface, improving areal precipitation estimation through a combination of remote sense and ground-based measurements, and translating seeding effects on single storms into areal effects. Panelists also discussed inter-cloud interactions in a convective environment, rainfall-runoff-groundwater relationship and the impact of cloud seeding and environmental and ecological changes due to long-term cloud seeding.
The workshop also facilitated productive discussions around ‘New Approaches and Technologies for Rain Enhancement’. Chaired by Dr. Steve Griffiths, Senior Vice President for Research and Development at Khalifa University, the session provided an insight into the technologies for observing physical phenomena, data modeling, analysis, and evaluation and experimental design, technologies, and instrumentation.
Summarising workshop outputs, Dr. Robert Robinson, co-chair of the committee, outlined the key takeaways and observations from the workshop participants.
The outcomes of the IREF town hall meeting, which took place on 21 January under the theme of “Determining Future Directions for Rain Enhancement Research”, provided important input for the discussions during the workshop, and for the shaping of the new UAEREP solicitation and the research proposal calls.
In AFRICATECH of August 22, 2019; More deals, less conflict? Wondered Laurie Goering, Thomson Reuters Foundation whilst Cross-border water planning key, report warns.
LONDON, Aug 22 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Efforts to share rivers, lakes, and aquifers that cross national boundaries are falling short, raising a growing risk of conflict as global water supplies run low, researchers warned on Thursday.
Fewer than one in three of the world’s transboundary rivers and lake basins and just nine of the 350 aquifers that straddle more than one country have cross-border management systems in place, according to a new index by the Economist Intelligence Unit.
With more than half the world’s population likely to live in water-scarce areas by 2050 and 40 percent dependent on transboundary water, that is a growing threat, said Matus Samel, a public policy consultant with the Economist Intelligence Unit.
“Most transboundary basins are peaceful, but the trend is that we are seeing more and more tensions and conflict arising,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
When work began on the index, which looks at five key river basins around the world from the Mekong to the Amazon, researchers thought they would see hints of future problems rather than current ones, Samel said.
Instead, they found water scarcity was becoming a “very urgent” issue, he said. “It surprised me personally the urgency of some of the situation some of these basins are facing.”
Population growth, climate change, economic and agricultural expansion and deforestation are all placing greater pressures on the world’s limited supplies of water, scientists say.
As competition grows, some regions have put in place relatively effective bodies to try to share water fairly, the Economist Intelligence Unit report said.
Despite worsening drought, the Senegal River basin, shared by West African nations including Senegal, Mali, and Mauritania, has held together a regional water-governance body that has attracted investment and support, Samel said.
Efforts to jointly govern the Sava River basin, which crosses many of the once warring nations of the former Yugoslavia in southeast Europe, have also been largely successful, he said.
But replicating that is likely to be “a huge challenge” in conflict-hit basins, such as along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq and Syria, Samel said.
Still, even in tough political situations, “there are ways … countries and local governments and others can work together to make sure conflicts do not emerge and do not escalate,” he said.
“The benefits of cooperation go way beyond direct access to drinking water,” he said. “It’s about creating trust and channels for communication that might not otherwise exist.”
‘NO EASY SOLUTIONS’
The report suggests national leaders make water security a priority now, link water policy to other national policies, from agriculture to trade, and put in place water-sharing institutions early.
“There are no easy solutions or universal solutions,” Samel warned. “But there are lessons regions and basins can learn and share.”
The index has yet to examine many hotspots, from the Nile River and Lake Chad in Africa to the Indus river system in India and Pakistan, but Samel said it would be expanded in coming years.
Working toward better shared water management is particularly crucial as climate change brings more drought, floods, and other water extremes, said Alan Nicol, who is based in Ethiopia for the International Water Management Institute.
“Knowing how a system works effectively helps you know what to do in the face of a massive drought or flood event – and we should expect more extreme weather,” he said.
While efforts to coordinate water policy with other national and regional policies and priorities are crucial, the key missing element in shoring up water security is political will, he said.
“We’ve been talking about this kind of integrated water management for 30 years,” he said. “The problem is practicing it. And that’s essentially a political problem.”
Reporting by Laurie Goering @lauriegoering; Editing by Claire Cozens. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, climate change, resilience, women’s rights, trafficking, and property rights. Visit news.trust.org/climate
The Rockfeller Foundation supported Cities‘ Ruth Michaelson wrote from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Tue 6 Aug 2019 the following article that elaborates on water increasing scarcity in Saudi Arabia and how despite that, life carries on somehow unaffected.
As Riyadh continues to build skyscrapers at a dizzying rate, an invisible emergency threatens the desert kingdom’s existence
The picture above is Irrigation canals in Saudi Arabia channel fresh water from deep wells and desalination plants to farms and homes. Photograph: Tom Hanley/Alamy
Bottles of water twirl on the conveyor belts of the Berain water factory in Riyadh, as a puddle of water collects on the concrete floor. In a second warehouse, tanks emit a low hum as water brought in from precious underground aquifers passes through a six-stage purification process before bottling.
“In Saudi Arabia, there are only two sources of water: the sea and deep wells,” says Ahmed Safar Al Asmari, who manages one of Berain’s two factories in Riyadh. “We’re in the central region, so there are only deep wells here.”
Most water withdrawn comes from fossil deep aquifers and predictions suggest these may not last more than 25 years: UN
Perhaps not surprising for someone who makes a living selling water, Asmari professes to be untroubled about the future of Saudi Arabia’s water supply. “Studies show water in some reserves can stand consumption for another 150 years,” he says. “In Saudi Arabia, we have many reserves – we have no problems in this area.”
His confident predictions are out of sync with the facts. One Saudi groundwater expert at King Faisal University predicted in 2016 that the kingdom only had another 13 years’ worth of groundwater reserves left.
“Groundwater resources of Saudi Arabia are being depleted at a very fast rate,” declared the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation as far back as 2008. “Most water withdrawn comes from fossil deep aquifers, and some predictions suggest that these resources may not last more than about 25 years.”
Fans spray water on Muslim pilgrims around the Grand Mosque in the run up to the annual Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Photograph: Dar Yasin/AP
In a country that rarely sees rain, the habit of draining groundwater, like the Berain factory does, could prove perilous: groundwater makes up an estimated 98% of naturally occurring fresh water in Saudi Arabia.
Indeed, oil may have built the modern Saudi state, but a lack of water could destroy it if drastic solutions aren’t found soon.
The emergency seems invisible in Riyadh, which is undergoing a construction boom as more buildings creep upwards to join a collection of towering skyscrapers.
It’s the desert. Obviously, water is a natural constraint by Dr Rebecca Keller
Although everyone knows this city in the desert owes its existence to the discovery of oil in 1938, fewer realise water was just as important. Decades of efforts to make the desert bloom to feed the city’s population have resulted in agricultural projects to grow water-intensive crops such as wheat, on farmland meted out to figures favoured by the royal family.
While many questions the accuracy of the kingdom’s optimistic estimates of its own oil reserves, the looming threat of a lack of water could prove to be an even bigger problem. Saudi Arabia consumes double the world average of water per person, 263 litres per capita each day and rising, amid a changing climate that will strain water reserves.
Saudi Arabia leads the world in the volume of desalinated water it produces, and now operates 31 desalination plants such as the one pictured, located outside Riyadh. Photograph: Fahad Shadeed/Reuters
In March, the Kingdom launched the Qatrah programme to demand citizens drastically cut their water use. Its aim is to ration water to 200 litres per person per day by 2020 and 150 litres by 2030.
It has also tried to reform the water-hungry agriculture industry, reducing government incentives for cereal production. The overall amount of irrigated farmland still hasn’t declined, though, as producers switch to more profitable crops that still require large amounts of water. Almarai, a major food producer, has begun buying up deserted land in the US, on plots near Los Angeles and in Arizona, and in Argentina, in order to grow water-rich alfalfa to feed its dairy cows.
The Saudi Arabian National Transformation Plan, also known as Vision 2020 – a subset of the Vision 2030 initiative intended to diversify the Kingdom’s economy away from oil – aims to reduce the amount of water pulled from underground aquifers for use in agriculture. It seeks to employ 191% of these water resources for farming, down from the current estimates of 416% of water available.
“This means that Saudi Arabia is using more than four times the water that renews on average – and that’s in Vision 2020,” says Dr Rebecca Keller from Stratfor – a private intelligence and geopolitical analysis firm – who says she was shocked after learning about the country’s water use. “Technically they’re using fossil water, which renews at a really, really slow rate. The sheer volume of overuse stood out to me.”
Desalinating sea water has long been seen as a silver bullet against the growing threat of water shortages across the Middle East. Saudi Arabia leads the world in the volume of desalinated water it produces and now operates 31 desalination plants. Desalinated water, as distinct from naturally occurring fresh water, makes up 50% of water consumed in Saudi Arabia. The remaining 50% is pulled from groundwater.
Changing water consumption habits remains the toughest challenge for Saudi Arabia. Photograph: Hasan Jamali/AP
It comes as at a high-energy cost, however. According to the International Energy Agency, in 2016 desalination accounted for 3% of the Middle East’s water supply but 5% of its overall energy cost. Researchers at King Abdelaziz University in Jeddah estimate that the demand for desalinated water increases by roughly 14% each year, but add that “desalination is a very costly process and is not sustainable”. Desalination plants also harm the surrounding environment, pumping pollutants into the air and endangering marine ecosystems with their run-off.
A recent push towards using solar power rather than fossil fuels to desalinate means that the first commercial plant is expected to be up and running at 2021 at the earliest, although it reportedly remains behind schedule.
Keller says Saudi Arabia’s evolving use of desalination technology could also alter their relationship with other countries in the region, in particular, Israel. “They’re producing the most cutting-edge technology for desalination, especially at scale,” she said. “As we see [both countries] having more geopolitical things in common in terms of their attitude to Iran, there’s more room for this relationship to grow, and the Saudi water sector is something that could benefit from this cooperation.”
The toughest challenge of all remains switching consumption habits to avoid an impending water emergency. The kingdom is pressing ahead with its Red Sea Project, a tourism haven the size of Belgium that aims to attract a million visitors annually to its unspoiled beaches and 50 new hotels. Such mammoth construction means growing water use, with current estimates that the string of resorts will use 56,000 cubic metres of water per day.
“It’s the desert,” said Keller. “Obviously water is a natural constraint.”
This article is significant news in the MENA region; the most water-scarce region in the world, where desalination plants are for some time now ‘run of the mill’ urban furniture. An improvement in the filtering membrane would have a financial impact on the running costs of these plants. It could encourage the inception of more especially in those other and remote areas with limited finances. A new filter turning saltwater into freshwater upgrade would undoubtedly impact not only this water industry but also all those linked with the region’s agriculture and food production.
“Making the material smoother prevents it from getting gunked upquickly”, as per Maria Temming, author of this article posted on August 16, 2018, by ScienceNews would certainly not fall in deaf ears whether from these last referred to countries but from all of the MENA region. The only snag would be that of whether sea water rising could suffice to feed all those prospective plants.
SMOOTH MOVE Hundreds of millions of people rely on desalinated water from plants like this one in Dubai. A new-and-improved salt-filtering material could help make freshwater production more affordable. Stanislav71/Shutterstock
Smoothing out the rough patches of a material widely used to filter saltwater could make producing freshwater more affordable, researchers report in the Aug. 17 Science.
Desalination plants around the world typically strain salt out of seawater by pumping it through films made of polyamide — a synthetic polymer riddled with tiny pores that allow water molecules to squeeze through, but not sodium ions. But organic matter, along with some other waterborne particles like calcium sulfate, can accumulate in the pockmarked surfaces of those films, preventing water from passing through the pores (SN: 8/20/16, p. 22). Plant operators must replace the membranes frequently or install expensive equipment to remove these contaminants before they reach the filters.
Now researchers have made a super smooth version without the divots that trap troublesome particles. That could cut costs for producing freshwater, making desalination more broadly accessible. Hundreds of millions of people already rely on desalinated water for drinking, cooking and watering crops, and the need for freshwater is only increasing (SN: 8/18/18, p. 14).
Manufacturers normally create salt-filtering films by dipping porous plastic sheets into chemical baths that contain the molecular ingredients of polyamide. These molecules glom onto the sheet, building up a thin polymer membrane. But that technique doesn’t allow much control over the membrane’s texture, says Jeffrey McCutcheon, a chemical engineer at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.
McCutcheon and colleagues made their version by spraying the polyamide building blocks, molecular layer by layer, onto sheets of aluminium foil. These polyamide films can be up to 40 times smoother than their commercial counterparts.
Such ultra-smooth surfaces should reduce the amount of gunk that accumulates on the films, McCutcheon says, though his team has yet to test exactly how clean its films stay over time.
Ironed out
Typical polyamide films for filtering saltwater (shown in the scanning electron microscopy image to the left) have rugged, pockmarked surfaces that trap organic material and other particles, clogging the filter. New, ultrasmooth polyamide membranes (right) could avoid that problem.
A microscopic image of two polyamide films for filtering saltwater M.R. CHOWDHURY ET AL/SCIENCE 2018
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