The Seawater Greenhouse: A Desalination / Agriculture Hybrid
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 08.31.06
The Seawater Greenhouse offers a low cost, sustainable solution to the problem of providing water for agriculture in arid, coastal regions. “The process uses seawater to cool and humidify the air that ventilates the greenhouse and sunlight to distill fresh water from seawater. This enables the year round cultivation of high value crops that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to grow in hot, arid regions…The overall process is extremely energy efficient. 1kW of electricity expended on pumping will remove 500kW of heat. Water can be produced at low energy costs (<3kWh/m3)”. Much better than building a nuclear power plant to run a traditional desal unit. See earlier TreeHugger post on an analogous, but far less promising looking project here .
Via: The Guardian .
Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
- Phytocapping To Rehabilitate Landfills, Reduce Greenhouse Emissions
- Renewable "Energy Islands" at Sea Could Power Cities, Produce Fresh Water and More
- EWA Squeezes Water From Thin Air, Like In Old Biblical Times
- Bruce Sterling and the Last Viridian Note
Nukes are being built to run desalination plants? If you want a scary alternative to frame this, why not just pick whatever fossil fuel burning power plant they actually use? I'd choose a nuke plant any day of the week rather than suck in the fumes of one of those.
Regardless of all that, this greenhouse is an elegant solution. I recall reading about this awile ago, and it's nice to get an update.