Aussies believe in global warming...

[AussieOwner]

Despite what Pat has just said, you cannot blame all the problems on water management. There were attempts to better control water..

The Snowy Mountain hydro-electric scheme was built in the late 50's/early 60's to produce clean power, and divert the water from the east coast to the whole Murray-Darling system, via the Murrumbidgee. Now there is no water coming from the Snowy - in fact, they are experiencing issues with generating power because of the lack of water.

My family used to own a sheep and rice farm in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation region, and now this is almost a dust bowl. One of the major rice firms has had to close one of their plants because not enough rice can be grown due to the lack of water, so even the NSW farmers cannot get water.

[FL_Prius_Driver]

Originally Posted by AussieOwner

Despite what Pat has just said, you cannot blame all the problems on water management. There were attempts to better control water..

Both your and Pat's points are not in opposition. Nature is always unleashing extremes somewhere, and when poor planning has been in place, everyone suffers. The trick is not to point fingers, but to apply the lessons quickly. In the US, Hurricane Katrina destruction in New Orleans is a very concise example of the same thing.

[burritos]

Originally Posted by hyo silver

Well, what's the obvious answer for a coast with abundant sunshine? Solar distillation of sea water seems inevitable. Or conservation, but nobody seems to like that idea. We can't have golf courses in the desert losing money, now can we?

When you say solar distillation are you talking about converting solar energy to electricity to power desalination plants? Or can you just aim mirror in the ocean water, have it steam up, and collect that?

[tripp]

There are a couple of ways. There are also systems that pull water out of the air that are run by solar, but I don't know how they work. RenewableEnergyWorld.com has had a few articles over the last 2 years about those systems. They have been set up here and there in Africa, where clean water is often an issue.

[jayman]

I'm hopeful a method of solar distillation could be arranged that would be effective for a large city

[FL_Prius_Driver]

The original market that LUZ (builders of the first nine US thermal solar plants) targeted was to do exactly this, use the output of solar collectors to drive heat driven processes, like distillation.

Water is vastly easier to store than electricity, so intermittent operation of the plant is easily handled and planned....and the chances of a distillation plant being too big is not going to happen anytime soon.

[hyo silver]

Originally Posted by burritos

When you say solar distillation are you talking about converting solar energy to electricity to power desalination plants? Or can you just aim mirror in the ocean water, have it steam up, and collect that?

No, I wasn't thinking of using either electricity or mirrors. The whole thing is driven by direct solar heating to evaporate sea water. My original idea, looking back to the crude sketches I did as a teenager, was for a floating dome that would collect the condensate and pump it onshore with wave-driven pumps. Deeper water would be brought up to cool an interior metal surface for the vapour to condense on. I may need a few years of engineering school to perfect it. Either that or someone with more money than ideas who'd like to trade places.

[DaveinOlyWA]

heard a pretty good show about solar power in Cali desert being built and set to be online by late 2010 or 2011. it uses mirrors to concentrate the beams to heat up this liquid stuff to a very high temperature that runs boilers to produce electricity with steam. it also heats up enough of this oil-like substance that it can continue to produce power for up to 3 days after the sun goes down. specs are for over a GigaWatt during peak daylight, 200 MW during off-peak

now the cost of the plant is relatively small and the construction time is less than half of conventional power plants. its estimated that less than ½ of one percent of AVAILABLE land in the Mojave Desert would be needed to generate enough electricity to supply all of cali power needs.

like the US, Australia has a very valuable and UNUSED resource and that is space. tons and tons of available land sitting there that no one really wants or needs.

many environmentalists cry that wind, solar, geothermal, etc will destroy our natural beauty. well that is BULL. there is more than enough land in the US to go around.

its estimated that if we eliminated all the occupied and developed land, all the parks, reserves, wetlands, etc along with a buffer around them, eliminate all the habitats of certain rare species (all of which will die anyway if we continue to destroy the environment by burning fossil fuels BTW), etc...

then divide the remaining land by half (just in case we forgot someone) we would only need a fraction of one percent of the land left to build a solar array that would service the needs of the entire United States...

now, what would that cost?? about an 8 year oil bill. i be willing to bet Australia is pretty much the same

[tripp]

The nice thing about CSP plants is that the guts is a typical Rankine cycle natural gas plant. You can have CSP with molten salt thermal storage with NG backup for extended periods of low quality sunlight. My impression of CSP is that it degrades very poorly in the event of sub optimal sunshine. PV degrades a lot more gracefully, I think. The upside is that CSP is pretty darn efficient, considerably cheaper at scale, and allows for very efficient heat storage in molten salts (which are more efficient than batteries, and a lot cheap, I believe). I imagine that we'll see Oz tapping CSP for desalination. Perhaps some sort of concentrating distillation process.

[jayman]

Yes I agree