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posted by CoolHand on Friday July 12 2019, @04:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the two-for-one-deal dept.

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Clean energy and clean water are among the major challenges for sustainable development especially in emerging countries. But traditional approaches to electricity generation consume huge amounts of water. In the US and Europe about 50% of water withdrawals are for energy production.

Similarly, producing water for humans via desalination in countries with water scarcity is a huge consumer of energy. It's estimated that in Arab countries around 15% of electricity production is used to produce drinking water.

Now, researchers believe they have found a way to combine these actions in a single device.

Existing state-of-the-art solar panels face physical limits on the amount of sunlight they can actually turn into electricity. Normally about 10-20% of the sun that hits the panel becomes power. The rest of this heat is considered as waste.

In this experiment, the scientists designed a three stage membrane distillation unit and attached it to the back of the photovoltaic (PV) panel.

The membrane essentially evaporates seawater at relatively low temperatures. The researchers were able to produce three times more water than conventional solar stills while also generating electricity with an efficiency greater than 11%. This meant the device was generating nine times more power than had been achieved in previously published research.

"The waste heat from PV panels has really been ignored, no one has thought about it as a resource," said lead author Prof Peng Wang from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia.

"We use the heat to generate water vapour that gets transported across the membrane and then it condenses on the other side."

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48910569


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  • (Score: 2) by Pav on Saturday July 13 2019, @10:43PM

    by Pav (114) on Saturday July 13 2019, @10:43PM (#866729)

    Combined with hyroelectric storage it IS the ultimate form... and despite having a right wing pro coal government my nation (Australia, the driest and flattest continent) is moving away from coal and towards hydroelectric storage paired with wind and solar. It's actually the privatised energy market that is forcing this move. They're turning all the old hydroelectric generating capacity (eg. the 3.7GW Snowwy Mountain Scheme [wikipedia.org], the Wyvenhoe Dam near where I'm living now etc...) into pumped storage. In the south they're pairing the sea cliffs with salt water hydro, and in the north (at Kidston [youtube.com], near the town where I grew up) they're trialing using an old open-cut mine pit as a pumped hydro reservoir. This is interesting because pits all over the country regularly fill with water anyway... it's a problem for mining.

    If pumped hydro storage (the storage answer to completely replacing coal with renewables) is feasable at scale in the flattest and driest continent, then it's feasable in much of the world.

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