California Is Building the Largest Solar Desalination Plant in the U.S. | Hacker News Reader

California Is Building the Largest Solar Desalination Plant in the U.S.

fastcoexist.com

44 pointscryptoz11 comments

Why have I never heard of a Direct Public Offering before? Is it less legally onerous than a full-on IPO?

Personally I wouldn't trust my money to a company with unproven technology promising a six percent dividend but hey, good luck to them.

Still, if it's such a good investment why haven't they been able to attract big money instead of selling dribs and drabs to possibly-naive investors?

There is an exception from SEC registration for stock offerings that are wholly within the state of the company making the offering (i.e., only advertised and available to residents of that state). State stock registration requirements are usually far simpler than SEC registration requirements.

They likely haven't been able to attract major funding since inland desalinization isn't as sexy as coastal desalinization. Moreover, unlike major utility projects, their revenue growth is hampered by their ability to scale up across hundreds or thousands of installations with no built-in mechanism for cost recovery.

It claims they don't discharge brine, but doesn't explain where the salt ends up? Nonetheless solar desalination looks like an extremely sensible technology approach in California.

They say they turn the salt into useable products. Such as?

Salt is quite valuable if it can be refined. Pairing salt production with desalination is common.

This is agricultural runoff they are desalinating, right? I would've thought it is so full of other stuff that it would be too contaminated to extract salt. But I don't know anything about the refining process so maybe it is feasible to get very pure salt even in the presence of contaminants.

http://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/salt/mcs-20... says solar salt is $50/ton ($0.05/kg). I doubt that's even break-even price after transport for a small scale producer if that's how much the commodity broker will resell it at. It's maybe same or less than the price of sand?

Sand is considered quite valuable also...where value is relative of course. India in particular has a big problem with illegal sand dredging.

This article adds a little bit of info about the solids:

http://waterfx.co/blog/an-inside-look-at-the-aqua4-technolog...

What are the leftovers after the distillation process, and what specifically will happen to them at the HydroRevolution plant?

The HydroRevolution plant is aiming to produce two products: water and solid salt. The water will be transferred to Panoche and the solid salt will be further processed by WaterFX and industrial partners into various downstream by-products that can be sold into the industrial and chemicals markets. Examples of these by-product materials are building components (gypsum), metals, selenium, and recovered fertilizers.

I think if they were distilling seawater they would probably end up discharging brine.

I'm hoping somebody will combine methane hydrate harvesting with desalination - both seaside activities that serve large populations, cross-investing, bootstrapping one another. And making clean water and energy truly fungible commodities.

the uses of non potable water are immense so the need to purify is simpler can be a good extension of the work this company is doing.

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