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Smooth operators

Solar power is a great source of green energy, but it can also be inconsistent.

When clouds pass over or the sunlight adjusts, solar-plant electricity outputs can move up and down like a volatile stock. This can make power-grid stability complicated.

A recent study from Khalifa University suggests that these volatilities can be tempered by allowing batteries and hydrogen storage to work together.

Batteries can manage and handle quick changes in power, while extra energy can be utilized to produce hydrogen. The hydrogen is then stored and later converted back into electricity with fuel cells.

This system’s control strategy constantly monitors battery charge, hydrogen levels and efficiency to determine how to share the workload in real time.

The simulations reveal that this method reduces battery degradation by approximately 50 percent while maintaining much smoother solar power flow to the grid.

More like this: Solar panel sunscreen

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Ask the experts: What’s the future of hydrocarbons in an increasingly green world?

Behaviors must start changing now

Michael Jefferson

From the supply side there are a few problems facing us as we (or some of us) endeavor to move to “an increasingly green world.” For example, the UK is Europe’s windiest country, yet in the first 11  months of 2021 there were at least 85 days when wind energy failed to provide even 10 percent of the country’s electricity grid load, leaving gas (and sometimes even coal) to come to the rescue.

Things are not helped by the fact that this sector has only just begun to invest in significant volumes of back-up storage, and wind energy producers who look as if they may produce electricity when not required are paid to shut down temporarily.

Michael Jefferson

Michael Jefferson is a professor at ESCP Europe Business School (London campus). Read more›››

Formerly Group Chief Economist, Shell International (1974-1979), and other planning and oil supply and trading posts (1979-1990); deputy secretary general, World Energy Council (1990-1999); lead author, contributing author, IPCC reports; recipient of the IPCC’s certificate for contributing to their award of the Nobel Peace Prize, 2007.

Chairman, Policies Committee, World Renewable Energy Network, 1991-2007; senior editor Energy Policy journal 2013-2019.‹‹‹ Read less

On the demand side there are serious issues arising about how societies will be able to cope as demand for electricity rises concurrently with pressure to reduce reliance on hydrocarbons. The demands of re-charging electric vehicles is but one of these. There is also the rising opposition to plastics. We should all abhor plastic waste. But there are estimated to be up to 9,000 plastics products, all reliant on hydrocarbons (petro-chemicals is perhaps a more relevant term here).

You may gather that I believe we are still only in the early stages of realizing how great the challenges are of seeking to move forward along an increasingly green path.

Hopefully a greater effort will be taken in using solar power, wind towers, learning from traditional architectural layouts to reduce dependence on hydrocarbons. But we all need to be aware of the many basic needs provided for by petro-chemicals, realistic time horizons for moving off petroleum in the transportation sector, and the key contribution which gas will make to the needed energy transition. In many countries, the general population remains concerned about the safety of nuclear power, and perhaps insufficiently aware of the current constraints or challenges to wind and wave power, and modern biomass.

Readers of this may find me unduly pessimistic, so I had better point out that I believe human activities have raised near surface global temperature by just over 1 degree Celsius over the past 140 years, and I fear they could raise it by nearer 3 degrees (rather than 1.5 or 2.0) over the remainder of this century.

I have worked with climate research scientists for over 40 years, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) between 1991 and 2015 in various roles, and believe strongly in the need for sound precautionary policies and investments — as well as behavioral changes — now to counter climate change, even if the start of a new global solar minimum happened to be just round the corner.

 

Hydrocarbons will continue to have a significant role

Mai Bui

Hydrocarbons have provided the majority of the world’s energy needs for centuries. Employed in many areas of society, hydrocarbons have played an important role in the power, industry, transport, commercial and residential sectors, with 84 percent of the global primary energy consumption currently coming from fossil fuels. At a global scale, total anthropogenic CO2 emissions reached 36.4 Gt/year in 2019, which reduced to 34.07 Gt/year in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Subsequently, a growing number of countries and companies have recognized the need to commit to a target of net-zero emissions by 2050 (or 2060 as in China’s case).

Mai Bui

Mai Bui is a research associate at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London.

Even at a national scale, reaching net-zero will be a major challenge, requiring unprecedented levels of greenhouse gas emissions reduction and removal from the atmosphere. The net-zero transition will employ a portfolio of different technology options, including renewable energy, hydrogen and energy-efficiency improvements.

Carbon-capture and -storage (CCS) technologies will also play an important role in reducing emissions associated with hydrocarbons in the power and industrial sectors, as well as generating low-carbon hydrogen (e.g. from natural gas or biomass) to use for transport or residential heating. CCS can also be used for CO2 removal from the atmosphere, which can be used to offset any residual CO2 emissions that are not captured.

It is highly likely that hydrocarbons will continue to have a significant role for the upcoming decades, particularly in countries and sectors that currently rely on carbon-based fuels. Although 2050 seems far into the future, reducing emissions at a gigaton scale will require major infrastructure changes and large-scale deployment of low-carbon technologies.

Carbon capture and storage could be key to helping tackle global warming. CREDIT: Shutterstock

Furthermore, governments will have an essential role in developing policy that will support and facilitate the transition to net-zero. Although urgent action is needed immediately, it is crucial that the transition to a green-oriented future is affordable and socially equitable.

We need to strike the right balance between cost, energy security, meeting emissions-reduction targets, while also avoiding unintended negative impacts to society and the environment.

 

3 pathways to a net-zero future

Martin Haigh

In the long run, we need to get to net-zero CO2 emissions to stop the world’s temperature rising.

That means that we need to be on a pathway to reduce our use of fossil hydrocarbons. In turn, that boils down to three options:

  • fossil hydrocarbons are not burned but used to make products like plastics (in which case those need to be either recycled or disposed of responsibly);
  • fossil hydrocarbons are burned and the emissions are captured;
  • or fossil hydrocarbons are burned and the emissions are balanced by negative emissions elsewhere.

Then the debates start about how we achieve this. Because of the pervasive use of hydrocarbons across our economies and lives, the implications are profound: justice and equity. Which uses are seen as more legitimate? How much more time should developing countries have to decarbonize? Indeed, should developing countries’ emissions rise for a period in order to continue meeting human-development goals?

  • demand or supply of fossil hydrocarbons? Can you effect change by stifling production of fossil hydrocarbons, or do you need to address demand for any change to be lasting?
  • economics and practicalities. How much change is realistic by 2030? What are the knock-on consequences of changes? Which policies are most effective in driving change?
Martin Haigh

Martin Haigh looks after the long-term energy modelling behind the Shell scenarios.

These are just a few examples, but the “how” touches almost all areas of politics, economics, technology and society. We explored a range of alternatives in our scenarios: Waves, Islands and Sky 1.5, available here. These look at wider drivers of change and the implications for the whole energy system, hydrocarbon and non-hydrocarbon.

In the Sky 1.5 scenario, a stretching and rapid world of change across the energy system, we look at the most practical means of keeping the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels by 2100. All available options come into play, including negative emissions, and both technological (bioenergy with CCS) and natural (nature-based solutions).

In Waves, stronger demand combines with a widespread desire to drive the energy transition by focusing on elimination of fossil hydrocarbons as the root cause of climate change. In common with Sky 1.5 is strong growth in renewables and hydrogen, but in this scenario, CSS does not play a material role.

Going green means more than just reducing our energy consumption. IMAGE: Shutterstock

The result in Waves is that emissions take longer to peak and fall. In Islands, near-term energy (and hydrocarbon) demand grows more slowly than the other scenarios, as countries focus on trying to stimulate sluggish economies and address local concerns.

The flip side to factors leading to the slower growth in demand is that the pace of transition is slower and similar to historical norms. Here are our outlooks for the future of oil demand and supply.

In the long-term, demand moves away from oil. The timing of the peak of demand for oil is quite different, possibly even this decade (Sky 1.5). But there are very different trends underneath this, both regionally and across sectors. Some uses, notably the “non-energy use” sector (material products like plastics), continue to be robust throughout the century, while it moves away more rapidly in sectors like car travel. Our data set provides the figures behind this graph, together with outlooks for other hydrocarbons (natural gas, coal and bioenergy, the non-fossil hydrocarbon), alongside other energy sources, and then how the uses of these different energy forms evolve.

 

Gulf countries need to take the lead

Adnan Shihab-Eldin

With increasing momentum in favor of switching to global clean-energy sources (net-zero emissions) by around 2050, the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in November adopted a series of decisions embodied in the Glasgow Climate Act (GCA), which aims to achieve the Paris Agreement’s climate-change goal of keeping the projected rise in global average temperature below 1.5 degrees C.

Renewable technologies, solar and wind in particular, are at the forefront of the clean-energy mix. Nuclear energy and clean, carbon-neutral fossil-energy fuels could competitively be part of the mix, but their roles and shares are uncertain due to multiple, and sometimes contradictory, views about the optimal path of the transition, its component technologies and who will bear investment costs estimated at about $5 trillion annually by 2030, according to the NZE2050 scenario from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

There remain significant differences among industrial countries over how to proceed with emissions reductions: Some vehemently oppose expanding nuclear energy and clean fossil-energy technologies and some European countries are against including such technologies in the list of clean-energy sources and products eligible for global trade, raising obstacles to plans to export and import fossil-based clean (blue) hydrogen and ammonia.

Adnan Shihab-Eldin

Dr. Adnan Shihab-Eldin is a senior visiting research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies and a board member of both the Kearney Energy Transition Institute, Amsterdam, and Gulf Bank of Kuwait.

Those countries, and most environmental activists, are betting that renewable energy could provide most if not all of the clean-energy supply, despite technical and economic obstacles that prevent their share in electrical grids from exceeding, on average, about 30 percent. A number of extreme energy-transition scenarios predict a sharp decline in the contribution of fossil energy to total demand, from the current 80 percent to about 20 percent by 2050 (e.g. IEA’s NZE2050). However, such scenarios are idealistic, costly and difficult to realize.

Among a wide range of other scenarios, OPEC’s latest annual World Oil Outlook report projects oil and gas demand to grow, albeit at a slower pace, until at least 2045, with the share of fossil sources falling to about 70 percent.

Regardless of the degree of optimism or pessimism of these scenarios, the goal and trajectory of all energy-transition pathways are unequivocal: a rapid transition to a clean-energy mix, with a wide range of component technologies. The growing enthusiasm for protecting the environment is sometimes shrouded in an increasingly negative outlook toward fossil sources, irrespective of how clean some can be.

This will no doubt drive an accelerating shift in policies, unless countries with large reserves of fossil sources, combined with low production costs, such as the Gulf states, start immediately making strategic investments to develop CO2 capture, use and storage technologies (CCUS, or CCS), including direct capture of CO2 from air (DAC). The investments are huge but worth it, for they will help to maintain a robust role for fossil-energy sources. Although many CCS projects are being implemented by oil- and gas-producing countries, most of them are still of small capacity and their number is growing slowly due to their high cost.

In line with the GCA call to member states to make more ambitious and concrete pledges to reduce carbon emissions, the Gulf states should embrace an ambitious initiative: pledging to equip all fossil-based power plants with (CCS) systems by 2035. Such an initiative would be welcomed worldwide. Furthermore, it will reduce Gulf countries’ CO2 emissions by approximately 25 percent, or about 1 percent of total global emissions — a significant decrease given the size of their economies is about 1.8 percent of the global economy.

Individual countries have their own views on how to go green in a post-carbon future. CREDIT: Shutterstock

Most importantly, implementing this initiative will significantly reduce the cost of CCS technologies, increase their reliability and global acceptance and ensure a continued robust role for oil and gas well into the second half of this century, while providing clean energy sources (electricity and fuel) to the world’s poor. Recently, the Gulf countries have taken encouraging steps in this direction. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have adopted clear and well-considered energy-transition strategies.

As part of its Vision 2030, the KSA implemented major environmental initiatives and emission-reduction programs such as the “Green Saudi Arabia” and announced its commitment to becoming carbon neutral by 2060 and producing 50 percent of its electricity from renewable-energy sources by 2030.

On a similar path, the UAE nearly 15 years ago launched pioneering initiatives and implemented the construction of Masdar Clean Energy City, four nuclear power plants and several large solar power plants with total capacities of more than 2 GW. But more investments and innovations are needed to make CCS and clean fossil fuel an important component of the future global clean-energy mix.

The GCC countries and other low-cost oil producers have the most to gain if they do and the most to lose if they don’t.

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Sea, salt and sun:
Desalination’s brighter future

If you’re ever lost in a desert, finding a water supply is key to your survival. Understandably, this is difficult in a desert as there is neither enough rainfall nor open-water sources, such as rivers or lakes, to reliably support the people inhabiting these areas. What many desert regions do have, however, are coastlines with access to plenty of salty seawater.

Enter desalination.

Desalination is a brilliant way to make fresh water. Seventy percent of the world is covered with water, but only 1 percent of that is potable. The solution? Take the salt out of the sea.

In the United Arab Emirates, even the groundwater is saline, in some cases up to eight times as salty as the surrounding seawater. Although this brackish groundwater can be used in irrigating salt-tolerant plants like date palms, everything else needs that water to be desalinated.

IMAGE: Anas Albounni, KUST Review
A harsh legacy of waste

“Historically, water availability has always been considered fundamental for human civilizations to evolve and flourish, from the early Mesopotamian age to the current rapidly growing cities in the Middle East. Read more›››

“Over time, wasteful water use, mismanagement and significant environmental challenges have triggered severe depletion and degradation of the available freshwater resources, with adverse effects on human health, living conditions, and social and economic prosperity.”

Tom Pankratz, Global Water Intelligence‹‹‹ Read less

In many ways, the Middle East is on the cutting edge of sustainability because the governments there were forced to confront water scarcity from the get-go. The evolution of water conservation and sustainability in this region is a result of a multi-pronged approach, involving rethinking city planning, efficient water use and innovative solutions to providing clean water.

A PERFECT FIT

Desalination plants are found in abundance in the Middle East: The U.S. Geological Survey says 70 percent of the world’s desalination plants are located in this area, found mostly in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain. This makes sense: These countries are water-strapped but oil-rich. An energy-intensive clean-water-production technique is a perfect fit.

This oil won’t last forever, though. And the world is already feeling the effects of global warming and climate change thanks to rampant use of fossil fuels in applications including desalinating water for desert populations. The solution? “Renewabilize” it. And luckily, the Middle East also has plenty of renewable energy to spare: sunshine.

RELATED: Desalination has social benefits – and costs, too

But first, how does desalination work?

The most popular method is reverse osmosis, where large quantities of seawater are pushed through a semipermeable membrane to remove the salt from the water. Think of this membrane as a very fine sieve that catches salt and other impurities.

Although this is an effective means to desalinate seawater, it is driven by very high hydraulic pressure and requires robust pumping and expensive pretreatment. In Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Region, for example, the seawater first needs to be filtered for oils, greases and jellyfish.

IMAGE: Shutterstock
What to do
with the brine?

Brine is a high-concentration solution of salt in water and is a byproduct of many industrial processes, including desalination. The simplest way to dispose of brine is to return it to the ocean, but high localized brine concentrations raise seawater salinity and alkalinity, creating an environmental risk. Read more›››

Another common way to dispose of brine is to use evaporation ponds, where the water is evaporated and the salt is collected for use in other processes. Unfortunately, neither method is a fully environmentally friendly approach, and untreated brine can be corrosive and toxic if disposed of improperly.

A collaborative work between King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia, and Khalifa University of Science and Technology, UAE, saw the design of a solar crystallizer that uses solar energy as the main energy source to heat and evaporate the brine. This follows the same concept as an evaporation pond, except the condensate from the evaporated brine is collected as fresh water.

This sounds like an obvious solution to reducing the water loss, but the amount of salt in the water can affect the performance of the materials in the crystallizer, so the team needed to design a new device in which the water-evaporation surface and the light-absorption surface are separated by an aluminum sheet with high thermal conductivity. The bottom and inner walls absorb the solar energy, while the outer wall performs the evaporation and crystallization parts of the process.

The research team says the high thermal conductivity of the aluminum separator conducts the heat generated at the bottom of the device to the walls for water evaporation, resulting in a “high solar-to-vapor performance.” They believe this is a simple but promising strategy to provide a low-cost and sustainable solution for treating industrial brine, especially in small- to medium-size applications.‹‹‹ Read less

SEAWATER: SEE WATER

Desalination is an energy-hungry process. According to Richard Muller, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, it will always take one kilowatt hour or more of energy to desalinate a cubic meter of seawater.

RELATED: Khalifa University is a hub for desalination research

But Corrado Sommariva, founder and CEO of the Middle-East-based Sustainable Water and Power Consultants, says the desalination sector has been experiencing a revolution in the past five years and believes the process can be powered by renewable energy, particularly solar.

The cost of desalination from reverse osmosis has fallen dramatically in recent years, with much of this decrease in price stemming from streamlining processes and cheaper electricity, he notes, and as solar power looks set to become the cheapest form of electricity, moving to a renewable-power supply seems inevitable.

Tom Pankratz, editor of the US Water Desalination Report, confirms: “Desalination is more energy-intensive than other water-treatment processes, so there’s a growing interest in using renewable energy to reduce a plant’s operating costs and its environmental footprint. In many places, especially in the Middle East where desalination is the primary source of water, renewable energy is often much less expensive – even with the abundance of fossil fuels in the region.

”In theory,” he says, “any form of renewable energy could power desalination, but solar power is generating the most attention. Helpfully, the arid regions that need desalination the most are also the ones blessed with abundant sunshine.

IMAGE: Anas Albounni, KUST Review
Solar stills:
A classic solution

Sometimes the old ways are the best ways. Read more›››

The oldest desalination technology is the solar still, a simple device that uses sunlight to purify water.

Salt water is placed in the still and an angled piece of glass or plastic is placed above. The sunshine evaporates the water, which then condenses on the surface above before running down the surface to collect in a separate trough.

The impurities and salt remain in the bottom of the still and the water in the trough is clean, pure drinking water.

If you do find yourself lost without a clean water supply, you can make a solar still from a sheet of plastic lining a hole in the ground, a mug to collect the clean water, and another plastic sheet on top anchored with a rock to create the angled surface.‹‹‹ Read less

“Solar farms are sprouting up in more and more areas in the Middle East, and their power generation gets priority to feed into the grid,” Sommariva says. “For at least six hours a day, power tariffs as low as 1 U.S. cent per kilowatt hour are available to utilities from photovoltaic plants as the amount of electricity being generated by these plants will shortly outstrip grid demand during certain hours of the day. Photovoltaic power offers the chance to both operate desalination plants as potable-water generators and grid-energy absorbers and buffers.”

A TOUGH BALANCE

The journey of electricity from the power plant to our homes and businesses is not always a smooth one. Grid operators are faced with the complex task of balancing the amount of electricity fed into the grid against the amount of electricity consumed to keep the power system stable. But as more intermittent renewable-energy sources of electricity, like solar and wind, are fed into the grid, this balancing act becomes even more challenging.

Pankratz notes that it’s no coincidence renewable-energy desalination plants are being implemented in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, where some of the largest solar photovoltaic power plants are also being built.

“For larger plants, it is often infeasible to locate a large wind- or solar-energy power plant near a coastal seawater desalination plant. In these cases, it is usually more practical and cost-effective to build the wind or power plant farther inland, and feed the energy into an electrical grid that can be distributed to the desalination plant and other facilities,” Pankratz says.

“This approach not only ensures that the desalination plant and energy plants are located where they are most cost-effective, but it also eliminates, or lessens, the need for large batteries to store the energy during the night or low-wind conditions.”

AN INGENIOUS BATTERY

Sommariva believes solar-power-driven desalination plants could also act as an electricity-storage system, using the excess electricity produced by photovoltaic plants, rather than continuously running fossil-fuel plants, to desalinate water. Connecting the desalination plant to the renewable-power grid could be the solution to two problems facing the region: renewable-energy storage and drinking-water shortage.

In theory, any form of renewable energy could power desalination, but solar power is generating the most attention.

– Tom Pankratz, editor of US Water Desalination Report

“If the industry could simply move away from the traditional concept of steady water generation mainly dictated by a lack of storage, we could imagine a desalination plant able to operate in a sustainable and flexible manner: producing when excess power is available in the grid from photovoltaic production and curtailing desalination when the grid is in peak mode,” Sommariva says.

Additionally, producing water when excess power is available from solar power and curtailing production when the grid is in peak mode does not require any dramatic changes to infrastructure, except an increase in storage capacity for the resultant potable water. As Sommariva points out, additional water-storage capacity is part of the strategic development in the region anyway.

“If the industry could simply move away from the traditional concept of steady water generation mainly dictated by a lack of storage, we could imagine a desalination plant able to operate in a sustainable and flexible manner: producing when excess power is available in the grid from photovoltaic production and curtailing desalination when the grid is in peak mode,” Sommariva says. Additionally, producing water when excess power is available from solar power and curtailing production when the grid is in peak mode does not require any dramatic changes to infrastructure, except an increase in storage capacity for the resultant potable water. As Sommariva points out, additional water-storage capacity is part of the strategic development in the region anyway.

CAPTION: Solar power-driven desalination plants could also act as an electricity-storage system. IMAGE: Anas Albounni, KUST Review

“It is necessary that policy makers start seeing desalination not only as a water producer but also a potential energy buffer and indirect storage system,” he says, adding that all of the desalination plants in the Gulf region and worldwide have the opportunity to smart retrofit and develop a net-zero-energy operational process.

CONTINUED IMPROVEMENTS

The potential use of renewable energy for desalination is hardly a new idea. Reported since the mid-1990s, a few conventional water-treatment plants in the United States have integrated solar power for water treatment, including a Massachusetts plant in 2009.

IMAGE: Anas Albounni, KUST Review
Managing
the resources

Previous poor water management and unsustainable agriculture practices in the Middle East have exacerbated desertification, and water scarcity is becoming severe in countries including Jordan and Yemen. Read more›››

Agriculture, industry, urbanization and population growth are all fueling the demand for more water, while climate change decreases supply day by day.

As the UN Food and Agriculture Organization points out, for every 1 degree Celsius of global warming, 7 percent of the world could see 20 percent of renewable water resources dry up. More frequent and severe droughts, combined with crops needing more water in higher temperatures, will put further pressure on dwindling water supplies.

According to the Water Project, other concerns with the future of desalination plants in the Middle East focus on the improper dependency they will cause, instead of encouraging alternate forms of water and energy to be explored and conservation of fresh water.‹‹‹ Read less

New renewable-energy technologies are becoming available for desalination applications as well. For example, an Australian pilot project utilizing wave-power technology for seawater desalination using submerged buoys began operating in 2015.

Despite the challenges, many researchers are working to improve desalination so it can reach more people and address climate change without contributing to it. The Global Clean Water Desalination Alliance has set a goal for 20 percent of new desalination plants to be powered by renewables between 2020 and 2025. Currently, the global share of renewable energy used in desalination is just 1 percent.

Sommariva does point out that the main challenge in pivoting to renewable-energy-powered desalination is retiring or converting traditional thermal-desalination assets.

“These plants have a residual economic life of several decades,” he explains. “Not to mention they are substantially energy-intensive. But desalination is a technology that is fast developing.”

There haven’t been any major recent breakthroughs in the technology, he adds, but the process is seeing a steady rate of improvements that are fine-tuning the process for ever-increasing efficiency.

A GROWING APPROACH

Already, stakeholders in the desalination industry are beginning to turn to renewables.

Dubai Electricity and Water Authority is planning to power its desalination plants with solar power by 2030, pushing for increased efficiency and large-scale integration of renewable energy in its water-production processes.

CAPTION: The desalination triangle: When the oil runs out, can the sunlight step in to power the process? IMAGE: Anas Albounni, KUST Review

In Port August, Australia, one desalination plant uses solar power to provide potable water for its tomato farm. In fact, in Western Australia, all new desalination plants must use renewable energy.

“All of the large Australian seawater desalination plant operators have contracts with renewable energy providers who supply energy into the local grid in an amount equal to that required by the desalination plant, in a cost-offset arrangement,” Pankratz adds.

Both the King Abdullah Economic City and the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia are supplied by solar-powered seawater desalination plants, taking water from the Red Sea. Also in the United Arab Emirates, one Masdar plant in Ghantoot produces desalinated water using a solar-powered solution. The company behind this plant, Mascara Renewable Water, is now developing similar projects in Mauritius, Cape Verde, South Africa, Morocco and Vanuatu.

OTHER PROJECTS

There have also been several small-scale trials across the Middle East, Spain and India bringing together concentrated solar power and seawater desalination. Pankratzs says there are on-going research projects looking into using other forms of renewable energy too, including those from wave power, geothermal and biomass sources, and even from the energy contained within salinity, chemical and pressure gradients.

“There is absolutely a real future for this, and it’s happening now,” he says. “Renewable-powered desalination is proving itself in plants in the GCC and around the world. It’s happening on a local scale too, with hundreds of small, renewable-energy desalination plants under construction in island communities and off-grid locations in developing countries such as Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique and Nigeria.”

As the planet faces an uncertain water future, desalination will continue pumping out freshwater for thirsty cities. And as renewables become increasingly mainstream and technology prices continue to fall, renewable energy will become an economically viable option as well as the environmentally friendly solution.

It’s not all bad though.

Renewable-powered desalination is proving itself in plants in the GCC and around the world.

– Tom Pankratz

Desalination can provide sufficient quantities of water as and when needed, which can significantly enhance the water security of a nation, while also supporting regional stabilities by evading any conflict over water resources. This also means there are a plethora of opportunities for society to benefit from desalination technologies.

Local employment opportunities during the construction and operation of desalination plants are one such benefit, but easy access to cheap water also means more work and education opportunities for women, who otherwise typically bear the often expensive, time-consuming and physically taxing burden of collecting and carrying water in the poorest communities.