Today is the international Water Day. Change.org has asked, to as many blogger as possible, to write, on the same day, a post about water: here I am.
Funny enough I am writing about something that I feel there should be many solutions available and often struggle to understand why there aren’t.
Water is the most abundant element on Earth: 3/4 of its surface is covered by water and yet providing clean and drinking water is one of the main issues to be addressed by developing countries. Yes of course most of the water available is sea water therefore salty water that cannot be drunk directly but, hey, it’s just about removing salt from it right?
Removing salt from water requires desalination that is well known to require specialised equipment and infrastructure and to be an energy intense process. Energy is required in terms of heat that is used to boil the water, produce steam and, more or less, distil it to separate it from the salts diluted in it. A very simple observation I am making is that most developing country are hot countries, places where the sun is visible and very hot for most of the year.
The question I am asking with this post is:
can the energy required for desalination be derived by sun and build eco sustainable plants that run next to the sea, in very sunny areas and produce huge amounts of fresh water by using just the sun light and heat?
I wish some scientist could see this and consider whether my question is too simplistic or, perhaps, it just requires people to take action…