Water Now More Awesome Than Previously Thought

Dan writes "Wired has a great article about a guy who thinks we can provide unlimited energy , accelerate crop growth, desalinize and purify drinking water, obtain health benefits and provide air conditioning, all by pumping up water from the depths of the ocean."

Comments

Re:This is fantastic!

[pla]

Luckily it's pure grade-A horse poop.

Er, no, not really. Granted, this particular guy sounds a few gallons short of a hogshead, but deriving useable energy from cooling things off works exactly the same way as by heating them up - Namely, we can use the transfer of energy from the warmer side to the colder side to perform useful work (such as generating electricity). The absolute temperatures involves don't particularly matter.

So why do virtually all human-created energy extraction technologies use warmer than ambient going to ambient as the two sides? Simple... We humans have enjoyed, at least for the past few millenia, a really easy way to get things hot (ie, fire and a supply of fuel that literally grows on (as?) trees). We have not had a convenient way of making something colder-than-ambient, except very recently (within the past century), and even then only by using the hot-to-ambient conversion to get electricity to do the ambient-to-cold conversion - Sort of trading one for the other, with a net loss in both conversions.

Deep ocean water, however, provides exactly that - A nearly limitless supply of something colder than ambient, with a high enough specific heat that the energy we can extract from the temperature gradient FAR exceeds the energy needed to pump it in the first place.


Imagine the climactic effects, and effects on the oceans ecosystems

Now, here you make a good point. In the short term, or on a small scale, I would tend to say that we couldn't even come close to the natural processes that mix the oceans. But then, people thought the same about burning wood and later oil, until just the past few decades.

Re:More Efficient Coastal Farming

[Courageous]

This is a fantastic idea, except for one flaw. This would only work for cities near the coast.

That's a goodly majority of all humanity.

C//

But it's not just a power plant

[lheal]

There are several factors that make up for the inefficiency in power generation:

1. the "fuel" is free.
2. the water is used at least twice, which decreases the relative pumping costs
3. power generation is just a positive side effect of supplying fresh water.

Places like Saudi Arabia and Chile, which have lots of sun and salt water, but almost no fresh water, should jump on this. Saudi Arabia in particular, which has all the power it needs, could really benefit.