When you hear about desalination, you think about maybe if you are stranded and there is no other source of drinking water available, you make do with desalinizing the salt water. But in places where water is hard to come by, or there isn’t much rainfall year round, desalinizing salt water into drinkable water is an alternative.
Which is why California is planning on building a solar desalination plant in order to bring more freshwater for people in the Central Valley. This would be the first solar desalination facility California has.
Who is building the facility?
The announcement came from a project called Hydro Revolution which is being run by a Water FX plant company that is operating in the Panoche Water and Drainage District treating irrigation drainage water. They plan on treating around 1.6 billion gallons in one year on the west side of the San Joaquin River.
What’s the game plan with the solar desalination plant?
The area the plant will be operating on is where the water will be fed to, the Panoche Water and Drainage District. By doing this, it is hoped that this will solve the drainage problems and boost crop longevity by feeding it fresh water.
What the project is hoping to do is to help start up a new way for California to use water in the state.
future plans for the solar desalination plant
What distills the drainage is the mirrors from the solar which will help to make it into the freshwater that you get at the end. The minerals that come out will be processed and the sold to other revenues to use. The proposed plant will be built on thirty-five acres to accommodate the facility.
At the moment, the water supply in the region is varies so much that it’s not a reliable water source. With this plant station in the region, hopefully it will be a reliable water source and an efficient one for agriculture.
