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Japanese Power Plant Turns Saltwater Into Electricity (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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It's not -a lot- of electricity ... a couple of thousand kWh per day. It's also used to de-salinate ocean water ... of which there's plenty.

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[–] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

So, they're using brine from a reverse osmosis plant and wastewater to run this process, both waste products, and probably producing something roughly the same as seawater.

Sounds bizarre, but apparently it works.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The reason being that dumping the brine back into the ocean creates a dead zone wherever that dump point is, since the relative concentration of salts is higher compared to regular seawater.

    They’re almost certainly recreating seawater just to help alleviate the dead zone effect and figured out how to get some free electricity out of it too

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago

    Right. It seems analogous to regenerative braking in a gas/electric hybrid car. The momentum is turned back into electricity to reclaim potential energy. Some of the energy was already spent in RO stage and this process gets some of it back.

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