Current Climate brings you the latest news about the business of sustainability every Monday. Sign up to get it in your inbox.
Welcome back to Current Climate. From legal fights in the Southwest over access to Colorado River water, to below-average snowpack in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, to Corpus Christi, Texas, facing a looming shortage, stable supplies of fresh water are becoming a greater concern to large portions of the country.
Desalination is an option to boost supply, and already does so at plants in California, Texas and Florida. But it’s a problematic one because of high costs and big energy needs. It can also harm aquatic life if seawater intake systems aren’t carefully designed. But a startup and a water agency in Los Angeles County are testing a new type of desalination that could provide large amounts of fresh water, using 40% less energy than the conventional variety.
Instead of pumping millions of gallons of seawater to shore and shooting it under high pressure through a series of membranes that remove the salt, desalination pods developed by Menlo Park, California-based OceanWell do the process deep in the ocean, anchored 400 meters below the surface, taking advantage of naturally occurring high pressure at that depth to power the salt-removal process. Seawater flows in through a series of screens, layered with reverse osmosis membranes designed to prevent the tiniest forms of sea life from being sucked in, with freshwater pumped out at the base and brine pumped back to the ocean from the top.
“The depth is a function of the pressure required for a [reverse osmosis] membrane to overcome the osmotic pressure. It’s about 800 PSI, and that’s normally what you have in an onshore plant – big pumps that pressurize the water to 800 PSI,” said David Pederson, general manager of the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District. “So it uses about 40% less energy because of that.”
Tests of the technology in the Los Virgenes reservoir, north of Los Angeles, under much lower pressure, confirmed the concept works. Now the goal is to build a large, commercial-scale version of the system, a water farm with dozens of the nodes, off the coast of Malibu that could pump between 50 million and 60 million gallons of fresh water back to land per day, starting by about 2030.
One factor to be worked out is a power source for the electricity the pods require, said OceanWell CEO Robert Bergstrom. That could come from connecting to an onshore power source, though tying the units to an offshore wind turbine would be a cheaper solution. Though the Trump administration is working to block offshore wind projects, California is still making plans to add them along its coast in the years ahead–most likely after Trump is out of office.
“We would love to be along that power transmission line,” Bergstrom said.
The Big Read
GM Doubles Down On Energy Business To Serve Data Center Electricity Demand
Months after slashing its lofty electric vehicle goals, General Motors is intensifying its focus on energy technology to keep up with data center needs for electricity. Now, it’s announced plans to develop a cheaper, more durable battery for large-scale energy storage.
The Detroit-based automaker is working with startup Peak Energy to develop a sodium-ion battery, aiming to commercialize it by 2028. Its goal is to leapfrog the dominant battery cell tech used for energy storage packs right now — LFP (lithium-iron phosphate), which is dominated by China. Sodium batteries are cheaper to use than LFP because they don’t need an additional cooling system. They also have a 20-year usable life and are made from materials that can be sourced from within the U.S., the company said at a briefing in San Francisco on Tuesday.
“Sodium-ion actually is the better chemistry for that application. And when I say sodium-ion is better, I mean GM’s version of sodium-ion,” Kurt Kelty, GM’s battery chief and a long-time Tesla battery executive, told Forbes. He said GM is seeing great results from its prototypes, even at scorching temperatures of 55 Celsius (131 Fahrenheit).
Hot Topic
Jeff Prosserman, CEO and cofounder of Voltpost, on using urban street lights to boost EV charging options
What’s the benefit of using street lights to charge EVs while people are parked at public spaces?
By retrofitting the existing infrastructure, we can significantly reduce the cost, the timing, and physical footprint of charger deployment in the built environment. And we’re able to do the power interconnection either through pulling power from the existing conduit to provide the 220 volts, the 9.6 kilowatts, per charger, or drop the power down from overhead utility poles.
We save 10s of thousands of dollars on a given site when you compare retrofitting the existing infrastructure to the construction and trenching work that’s required for a stand-alone charger. That’s because you’re tearing up the sidewalk or the street and laying new power. You’re effectively creating a much higher initial deployment cost for the installation.
How many cars can charge at once from the utility pole system?
We can deploy a single or dual port charger on a given pole of different shapes and sizes, round, octagonal, wood utility poles, ornate, decorative poles, done in a modular and upgradable format. And we can have different payment methods for the entry point, whether it be QR code entry, tap to pay through RFID card reader or credit card reader. It just depends on the site to provide flexibility to the site host. The other thing is it has over 25 feet of cable integrated inside the enclosure, which unlocks through the initiation of that charging event. The charger sits 10 feet above ground level. That maximizes reliability and compatibility because obviously there’s no cable exposed for anti-vandalism or weather conditions, et cetera, to maximize the uptime of the chargers.
How many units do you have in operation?
We have 20 to 30 live today, and we have north of 500 but under a thousand in contract. I don’t have the exact number off the top of my head, but it’s growing. We continue to win contracts across the country at this point. It’s very much a scale-up moment for the company.
Certainly, last year, as I’m sure you could imagine, with the federal policy headwinds, it became a slower growth year. We had three federal contracts that were frozen and just a number of other factors to navigate through. But at this point, everything’s kind of just been a speed bump, not the end of the road at all, and we’re back to effectively deploying at scale.
What Else We’re Reading
A mysterious ‘cold blob’ in the ocean has puzzled scientists. A new study says it’s an ominous sign (CNN)
New Qcells plant doubles current Georgia capacity to produce solar cells (Canary Media)
Solar power hits new milestones in the U.S. even as Trump boosts coal over clean energy (Associated Press)
Vinyl records are back, but they’re polluting the planet. These labels are trying to help (Los Angeles Times)