This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience while browsing it. By clicking 'Got It' you're accepting these terms.
Most recent
Trending
The best of EcoWatch, right in your inbox. Sign up for our email newsletter!
Abu Dhabi Desalination Plant to be Powered by Off-Grid Rooftop Solar
French engineering company Mascara will use off-grid, rooftop solar to power a desalination plant operated by clean energy group Masdar in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.
According to Renewable Energy World, the plant is the fifth desalination demonstration project from Masdar, which is currently running a pilot program to test renewably powered desalination plants in the United Arab Emirates. The group hopes to have a facility at commercial scale by 2020.
The project is expected to produce 30 cubic meters of water per day and will consume an estimated 2.8 kilowatt-hours per cubic meter of water, according to Marc Vergnet, head of Mascara. That's "significantly smaller" than the 3.6 kilowatt-hours per cubic meter of water that the other four desalination plants are projected to use, Water and Wastewater International Magazine said.
In addition to using less energy than the other four pilot projects, Mascara's will be the first to be off-grid and powered by solar. The trial is expected to begin in March and, if successful, Masdar said, the technology will be ideal for use in remote locations and especially on islands.
Desalination plants in the United Arab Emirates currently “are mainly thermal and aged," Dr. Alexander Ritschel, Masdar senior manager, told journalists on Monday. "There needs to be a transition to membrane-based desalination technology, which is more efficient than thermal processes installed sometimes up to 40 years ago.”
The five trial plants will run until 2017, with the goal of finding out “how the desalination plant of the future will operate,” Ritschel added.
Water stressed regions of the world, including the Gulf region, are rushing to develop energy-efficient desalination plants. There are an estimated 15,000–20,000 desalination plants around the world producing more than 20,000 cubic meters of water per day. Places as varied as Aruba, Chile and Algeria all use desalination.
Israel already supplies 40 percent of its drinking water from desalination. That number is projected to climb to 70 percent by 2050. Developers in Saudi Arabia are currently building the world’s first utility scale, solar-powered desalination plant. And last month, the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere officially opened in Carlsbad, California, as the state struggles to deal with its prolonged drought.
Desalination is a contentious issue, though. Critics, citing marine impacts and its high cost, say desalination isn’t a good solution and can’t solve droughts. Masdar and its partners, however, are hoping to change that by improving existing technologies.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
There Will Be More Plastic Than Fish in the Ocean by 2050
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
By Carlo Ratti, Ida Auken
On the window of a bike shop in Copenhagen, a sign reads: Your next car is a bike.
By Carey Gillam
For the last five years, Chris Stevick has helped his wife Elaine in her battle against a vicious type of cancer that the couple believes was caused by Elaine's repeated use of Monsanto's Roundup herbicide around a California property the couple owned. Now the roles are reversed as Elaine must help Chris face his own cancer.
The last 50 years have been brutal for wildlife. Animals have lost their habitats and seen their numbers plummet. Now a new report from a British conservation group warns that habitat destruction and increased pesticide use has on a trajectory for an "insect apocalypse," which will have dire consequences for humans and all life on Earth, as The Guardian reported.
Sales of electric cars are surging and the world is generating more and more power from renewable sources, but it is not enough to cut greenhouse gas emissions and to stop the global climate crisis, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Trending
By Jake Johnson
A Greenpeace report released Tuesday uses a hypothetical "Smart Supermarket" that has done away with environmentally damaging single-use plastics to outline a possible future in which the world's oceans and communities are free of bags, bottles, packaging and other harmful plastic pollutants.
By Irene Banos Ruiz
Pediatricians in New Delhi, India, say children's lungs are no longer pink, but black.
Our warming planet is already impacting the health of the world's children and will shape the future of an entire generation if we fail to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius (35.6°F), the 2019 Lancet Countdown Report on health and climate change shows.
Trending
The FBI is looking into how the state of Pennsylvania granted permits for a controversial natural gas pipeline as part of a corruption investigation, the AP reports.
Three cows who were washed off their North Carolina island by Hurricane Dorian have been found alive after swimming at least two miles, The New York Times reported Wednesday.