yesterday, right.....solar goes into the grid, the grid powers any industrial scale desalination.....
silliness aside, there will soon be formats where co generation will be economic, solar to power desalination, the generated brine bieng used for just salt, and then also refined for sodium to make batteries to capture more solar to power plants to turn sand into glass and purified silicone to make more solar and refine aluminum and copper.
agriculture in areas next to the ocean, where there is no fresh water, and essentialy free, barren flat land....fully robotisised greenhouses
the current scale of PV production is unbelievably huge, and growing....
land might be too expensive in California, but in Peru on the coast, there are never any clouds and vast areas that only need water to be productive, also as a desert, there are very few bugs and diseases to deal with, and even a short distance between operations would serve as an effective quarantine
These people do it with solar panels…
https://solarwatersolutions.com/
We first need to replace all fossil energy with electricity, so there's a long way to go still.
> We first need to replace all fossil energy with electricity
We really don’t. Desalinated water is certainly more socially useful than a bunch of other uses of power that we don’t question.
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yesterday, right.....solar goes into the grid, the grid powers any industrial scale desalination..... silliness aside, there will soon be formats where co generation will be economic, solar to power desalination, the generated brine bieng used for just salt, and then also refined for sodium to make batteries to capture more solar to power plants to turn sand into glass and purified silicone to make more solar and refine aluminum and copper. agriculture in areas next to the ocean, where there is no fresh water, and essentialy free, barren flat land....fully robotisised greenhouses the current scale of PV production is unbelievably huge, and growing.... land might be too expensive in California, but in Peru on the coast, there are never any clouds and vast areas that only need water to be productive, also as a desert, there are very few bugs and diseases to deal with, and even a short distance between operations would serve as an effective quarantine
Sadly I think AI is going to push that further out if we ever get to that point.