Change, how it happens, how long it takes and its impact
If anybody watched the Tony Seba videos or looked at the RethinkX think tank reports online and then looked at the solar water generator from MIT, they might see a transformation for many poor people of the world. All countries want energy independence and solar, wind and batteries can do it for most, if not all. Those in the tropical zones of 30 degrees north or south of the equator should benefit the most and most quickly. In such areas solar recharged cars will soon be possible that can get enough of their energy for daily use from the sun, better batteries and solar panels make this possible, free transportation in the tropics. People living in these regions need the least amount of solar power and battery storage and stationary batteries should get much cheaper. Global mass production is ramping up, the battery factories are sprouting everywhere.
The new water distillation method from MIT I posted about earlier is immensely important and might be combined with solar PV for co-generation of power and fresh water. It might be a classic engineering trade off, more electricity and less water or the other way around, or those distillation cells might just make water. Combining solar distillation with PV generation is possible though and the overall efficiency of the cells would be enormous, 20% used to make electricity and the heat used to distill fresh water. It can also be scaled from small village sized to Utility sized for large cities.
We are building solar PV installations of millions of square meters now, imagine if they also generated 10 liters of fresh water per square meter per hour? Every million square meters of collecting area could generate 10 million liters of water per hour, perhaps as much as 100 million liters a day. Unlike electricity water can be stored easily and accumulated in vast quantities. If it is cloudy and the system does not work, it is also likely raining too, think monsoon...
Cities could build facilities on the coast or a few kilometers from it where land is cheaper in desert coastal areas. The whole operation is PV powered along with solar distillation and need not be co-generating but can be powered from onsite PV. It only works in the daytime so not much battery storage is required. If sited properly, solar covered canals and pipelines can move fresh water vast distances by gravity alone. Use PV power to pump fresh water up coastal mountains and let gravity do the work to move it inland. If solar panels covered the canals, the system could deliver both cheap fresh water and electricity too.
Take a moment and imagine the implications and promise of such systems, the business opportunities too, for it is business that brings science and technology to fruition and use. Conventional solar distillation companies and those that use reverse osmosis are out of business, and had better adapt or die, and I mean fast! It will transform cities in the more equatorial and temperate dry zones all along the Mediterranean, the red sea, the Gulf, India and islands all over the world. It should also happen fast, a classic transformation and S curve of adoption over the next 15 years and will also follow classic cost curves as innovation happens.
Another thing this device can do is the final stage of sewage treatment to remove salts and further impurities for recycling or to use for plants and an urban tree canopy to cool things down and vastly improve quality of life. Many cities will look a lot different in 20 years if they plant urban forests and have plentiful water. Cheap water and electricity equal a good life in many warm dry countries and even homeowners can use gray water for gardens.
Add this into the many other technological changes coming rapidly in the next decade and converging like AI, robotics and biotechnology, and you can see a big transformation for many of the world's countries and populations with a vastly improved quality of life and standard of living. Places like India Africa and a host of others will be impacted the most and life for them will be transformed the most. Cheap or free energy combined with emerging technology changes everything. Technological change is accelerating every year and the efforts in most fields of science and engineering are global now and involve thousands of people from multiple professional disciplines Everybody is connected by the internet and news and education travels fast, the internet is an accelerator of technological change.
Maybe someone in India likes that MIT solar distillation idea and read the paper, being an engineer and a clever fellow, he might go to work on the idea and make it better while selling it to rich Arabs and making his fortune. That's really how change happens, he will be competing in a Darwinian race to the market place and someone else might have a better plan or simply be a better businessman.
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