Futurology

Cheap solar gives desalination its moment in the sun

Ever-cheaper solar power is a tailwind for the global energy transition. It can make energy intensive technologies more affordable. As a result, desalination is becoming a more popular option for providing drinking water to some of the driest areas of the world.

The logic of desalination is clear. Water is increasingly scarce as populations grow and climate change bites. Already, more than half of the global population experiences severe water scarcity for at least part of the year, says the World Health Organisation. This pits users against each other, as in Spain’s most recent drought.

Desalination taps an almost infinite resource — some 97 per cent of the world’s water is in seas and oceans. Costs have plummeted. Older, thermal plants, which used heat to turn salt water into steam, delivered potable water at more than $3 per cubic metre.

Graph: the price of desalinated water over time.

Since then, reverse osmosis technology — in which water is pushed through a membrane to remove salt, minerals and impurities — has taken over. Plants cost less to build — perhaps $400mn to purify 500,000 cubic metres per day, says Christopher Gasson of GWI. Including installation, a return on capital and operating costs, that translates to $0.30 per cubic metre of water.

Newer plants also need less energy — 2.6KWh per cubic metre — and are increasingly powered by cheap solar plants. The cheapest plant in the world gets energy at $0.025/KWh, or $0.07 per cubic metre.

Put that together and it explains how the Hassyan project in Dubai has promised desalinated water at just $0.37 per cubic metre. For reference, drinking water in London is priced at £1 per cubic metre.

At this sort of level, desalination becomes more affordable for dry, coastal areas, not just in the Middle East but also in Egypt, Algeria and Morocco, which are all building new plants.

Desalination has also become cheaper than building new infrastructure to transport water over long distances: the cut-off is roughly 500km according to Acciona, a major operator. As a result, the market for new plants is expected to grow by perhaps 8 per cent a year from now to 2030.

Of course, desalination is still unlikely to be the answer to the bulk of the global water crisis. Many areas of the world only face temporary or occasional water shortages, which spreads the capital costs of infrastructure over a much smaller volume of water. Agriculture, which accounts for 70 per cent of the world’s consumption, needs cheap water to produce affordable crops.

Yet, for all this, early movers in the desalination sphere, including Saudi Arabia’s ACWA power, Spain’s Acciona and France’s Veolia, have a clear advantage in a competitive race.

People often catastrophize about the potential for near misses with large asteroids. In reality, far more deadly "near misses" are happening with H5N1 bird flu, and they don't seem to be taken as seriously.

When mammals get the H5N1 bird influenza virus the prognosis is grim. Often with up to 50% mortality rates. Fortunately, although mammals (including humans) have gotten H5N1 from proximity to birds, the virus has not mutated to spread from mammal to mammal - so far. Yet it seems like we are constantly rolling the dice in the world's unluckiest lottery, and it may happen someday.

The latest gamble is being played out in the US farming sector. H5N1 has now been found in cows in 8 different states. Several cats on these farms have died from H5N1, probably via ingesting unpasteurized milk. This week US government officials have said material from the H5N1 strain, which is causing the outbreak, had been detected in milk sold in shops.

In a world with cultured meat from animal cells, and no farm animals, this problem would be greatly lessened. Especially in China, where animal farming sanitary standards are low. Is this all a reason to speed up a transition to meat via cultured cells?

NATURE.COM ARTICLE WITH FURTHER INFORMATION

We all keep reading about how generative AI is now so widely available that it poses a profound new threat to legitimate journalism and to trust in general. So I decided to find out exactly how easy it is to use the new weapon. It took me two days, $105 and no expertise whatsoever to launch a fully automated, AI-generated local news site capable of publishing thousands of articles a day—with the partisan news coverage framing of my choice, nearly all rewritten without credit from legitimate news sources. I created a website specifically designed to support one political candidate against another in a real race for the U.S. Senate. And I made it all happen in a matter of hours.

With OpenAI’s ChatGPT and a few lines of code, developers on freelancer websites such as Fiverr.com—the site I used to find my developer—can program websites to autonomously rewrite and publish articles from mainstream news outlets according to specific political preferences. Within a few weeks, I could even start earning programmatic ad revenue from my partisan AI content farm. Purchasing an AI content farm on Fiverr.com is as easy as ordering on Uber Eats. I searched “AI generated news website” on the home page and up came dozens of developers offering to build my site. (Tel Aviv-based Fiverr, which was founded in 2010 and trades on the New York Stock Exchange, is just one of many online marketplaces for freelance professional services.) The prices ranged from $30 to build a basic AI news site to as much as $350 to “create the best automated news website monetized with ads ready to earn,” according to one lister. I selected Huzafa Nawaz, drawn by his record (at the time) of 293 reviews with a 5.0 rating. The price—$80—also seemed more than reasonable. Nawaz is a young Pakistani who told me he is “around 30” years old; he communicated with me in English, with limited proficiency, by instant message. He is among dozens of developers on freelance marketplaces who build fully automated AI websites from the ground up for a minimal fee. “I will create automated news website autoblog,” Nawaz’s posting on Fiverr stated. “If you are looking for an automated website to generate extra passive income without any effort, my gig is your best choice.”

Surprising “photomolecular effect” discovered by MIT researchers could affect calculations of climate change and may lead to improved desalination and drying processes.

The U.K. will criminalize the creation of sexually explicit deepfake images as part of plans to tackle violence against women.

People convicted of creating such deepfakes without consent, even if they don’t intend to share the images, will face prosecution and an unlimited fine under a new law, the Ministry of Justice said in a statement. Sharing the images could also result in jail.

Rapid developments in artificial intelligence have led to the rise of the creation and dissemination of deepfake images and videos. The U.K. has classified violence against women and girls as a national threat, which means the police must prioritize tackling it, and this law is designed to help them clamp down on a practice that is increasingly being used to humiliate or distress victims.

“This new offence sends a crystal clear message that making this material is immoral, often misogynistic, and a crime,” Laura Farris, minister for victims and safeguarding, said in a statement.

The government is also introducing new criminal offenses for people who take or record real intimate images without consent, or install equipment to enable someone to do so. A new statutory aggravating factor will be brought in for offenders who cause death through abusive, degrading or dangerous sexual behavior.