On 14/07/2009, at 12:18 AM, John Williams wrote:
On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 7:05 AM, Charlie
Bell<[email protected]> wrote:
On 13/07/2009, at 11:39 PM, John Williams wrote:
If it takes a lot of energy to condense the water, then you need a
large wind-turbine or a lot of solar panels.
Depends how much water you need.
And how much energy does it take to manufacture the wind-turbines or
solar panels?
Depends on the answer above.
Would it have been more efficient to run a large-scale desalination
plant somewhere else (perhaps with nuclear power?) and pipe the
water
to the needed location?
Depends on how far you need to pipe it and to how many people.
Those questions were meant to be taken together.
Yeah, but splitting up the answer made sense to me...
It does not depend on
how much water (except for economies of scale) since the comparison is
per liter of water produced locally by wind-turbine vs. produced
elsewhere by other means.
...plus getting it there. So yes, knowing how much you need is part of
it.
So, a couple of wind units producing 10l/hr (5001/day, roughly -
plenty for drinking and cooking, at least) each of potable water
would go a
long way towards lowering the cost (energetic and fiscal) of
producing
drinking water.
How do you know they lower the cost? The wind units may cost more, per
liter per year, than some other source.
Well, I know that the comparisons that I saw at the time suggested
that the total cost was less. Sorry, can't remember or find the
figures right now.
I guess that's a long-winded way of saying - need to look at every
case on
its own merits, which I guess is probably where you were headed too?
More or less. I was just interested in comparing the cost of the
wind-turbine or solar-panel system to something more centralized.
Yeah, apologies for the lack of hard numbers right now. But I'm sure
admitting I can't find them is better than making them up. :-)
C.
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