Researchers Can Now Produce Clean Water And Electricity At The Same Time Using Solar Power

According to Saudi Arabian researchers, a device has been created in the attempts of using solar power for both energy and clean water production.

Combining water and energy production has been considered as a vital goal over recent years. Water and energy are currently on a “collision course” with the unsustainable development, as stated by the World Bank.

The world uses 10% of water for energy production from fossil fuels or nuclear. This figure is expected to rise up to 50 percent – 90 percent in the United State, China, and Western Europe. Besides a large amount of water used for energy production, water purifying via desalination also costs a significant energy amount together with costly infrastructure.

The nexus between water and energy affects seriously both semi-arid and arid regions. This is a reason why scientists explored using solar power to generate clean water.

Some methods in the past, including power generation from salinity gradient solar ponds using thermoelectric generators, are said to reduce the efficiency of electricity production, according to Peng Wang from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

To solve this issue, Wang and his colleagues designed a three-stage machine. Thanks to this machine, waste heat from photovoltaic solar panels was captured and recycled in order to purify water through multi-stage membrane distillation.

This method not only increases the efficiency of water production but also guarantees electricity generation, says the research paper in Nature Communications. Stated Wang:

It means that solar power is used with a far fuller capacity.

From test results, using only 1 square meter of solar panels, we can generate over 1.64 kilograms of water from industrial waste, contaminated groundwater, and seawater each hour.

According to the researchers, if the machine was scaled up globally, the large amount of purified water will be produced yearly. Specifically, with the installation on 4 billion square meters of land to generate solar energy capacity which is likely to be 969 gigawatts globally before 2025, the water amount produced yearly could be 4 billion cubic meters, which equals 10 percent of the total amount of drinking water consumed in 2017.

This method contributes to reducing fresh water production cost while helps 2 billion people around the world access to clean water.

Wang also reveals the next-generation device is under development to increase the efficiency of water production.

However, in order to expand it at an affordable cost, it's a must to overcome technological as well as engineering barriers.