Page - 66 - in Clean Water Using Solar and Wind - Outside the Power Grid

66 Clean Water Using Solar and Wind: Outside the Power Grid Membranes can be used to treat various kinds of contaminated water, like greywater, blackwater and urine. This is further examined in 7.2. 5.3 DESALINATION Worldwide about 300 million people get some fresh water from more than 19,300 desalination plants in 150 countries. Middle Eastern countries have the highest investment in desalination, but the technology is increasingly used around the world in water-scarce regions. According to the International Desalination Association, around 87 million m3 of fresh water is produced every day via desalination. If that amount of water could be equally shared between the world’s 7.6 billion people, then everybody would have more than 11 litres every day. The annual growth of desalination is projected to be 12% over the five years from 2018 to 2022. 5.3.1 Energy supply for desalination Today most of the energy supply for desalination is produced from fossil fuels and less than 1% comes from renewables (IEA-ETSAP & IRENA, 2013). Fossil-fuelled desalination has its problems, including the fact that electric power generated from coal and gas plants consumes water. Using a water-intensive resource to produce water is not sustainable. Therefore, we need to think about water as an energy resource and energy as a water resource. The fact that fossil fuel for water production is not sustainable from an economic and environmental point of view has also been recognised in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, where King Abdullah’s Initiative for Solar Water Desalination was announced in 2010 (IRENA, 2015b). The project has the goal of increasing water security for the country but will also contribute to the development of low-cost solar-based desalination technology. Increasing scale of deployment will make the solar desalination affordable in the long term. The cost of input energy is the dominating cost of desalination and is more than 50%. Considering continuously rising energy costs and with the impending Global desalination capacity today is sufficient to supply each person with 11 litres/day. Downloaded from https://iwaponline.com/ebooks/book-pdf/520710/wio9781780409443.pdf by IWA Publishing user