Request for Startups: Water
blog.ycombinator.com
blog.ycombinator.com
There were a few demo installations, but it never appeared as a volume product. There's a similar technology from Simon Frasier University.[2] They're looking for someone to commercialize it.
A YC startup might start by deploying that technology in East Porterville, CA, where the wells have gone dry.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slingshot_(water_vapor_distill... [2] https://www.biv.com/article/2016/5/water-machines-creator-th...
The distance refers to the supply chain and logistics involved shipping Slingshot to the villages, installing, and maintaining.
Well worth a watch of you're unfamiliar with the project.
Edit: I am also very curious about what happened to that bad-ass machine from Kamen.
That's $0.002 per gallon, about what CA water costs. All fresh from the sea.
75X cheaper than the 0.15 cents per gallon @mojomark estimates in the thread below that it would cost in fuel costs alone for a tanker to ship water from alaska.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the...
I can't tell exactly, but the $0.58/1000 liters seems to be amortizing the $400M investment cost, because it's on a 25 year Build - Operate - Transfer contract.
If anyone wonders why some resist accepting climate change as a fact, the above statement gets to a big piece of the underlying puzzle. I strongly suspect that if climate change was merely a scientific topic, there would be little-to-no resistance to accepting it as fact.
But it's not just a scientific question, it's (been made into) a question of how humans fundamentally live on the planet. And so of course a subset of society is going to resist societal change. It's not that people are particularly stupid, it's that they don't like the fundamental changes to how they live that they believe will follow.
Of course, we all know all of this, but for some reason we like to pretend we don't.
In my personal opinion, if you truly care about stopping climate change, you should be spending our effort developing solutions that do NOT require fundamental changes in how humans live on this planet. That path is much more likely to be successful in the political realm and thus more likely to actually save the planet.
Of course, issues with the greenlieness of electric cars, etc etc - but remember when solar panels were a net negative? AFAIK, that sure as hell didn't last.
Agree 100%! A few years ago Chevron ran an add campaign in DC metro depicting people saying things like "I will use less water" and "I will bike to work" and that shit made my blood boil. Every day I thought to myself "No assholes - how about you supply energy that isn't filthy!"
Given that pretty much all of our current energy sources have a carbon cost (e.g. in the production of solar panels), it makes sense to try to limit our consumption too.
I do agree. My issue was with the single-sidedness of Chevron's campaign. To me it implied that energy consumers are the primary cause of environmental woes.
Speaking for my industry only (commercial shipping), if companies were willing to sacrifice some profit & growth, commercial ships could all operate virtually free of harmful GhG emissions. This is technically possible today.
However, given the fragmentation and overcapacity that currently exists, the international competition is too fierce for any company to make such a leap for the general good. This is why IMO MARPOL emission regulations to include Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI) and Emission Control Areas (ECAs) are so critical - because it says to companies "hey, it's o.k. to spend a little extra on CAPEX and OPEX, because everyone else has to also." (1)
Given what is possible today with available technology, however, I think the emission control cap tiers are far too conservative. The final tier (in a few decades) should be zero GhG emissions for all shipping. It is feasible - and really with overcapacity where it is, now is the best time to take the plunge because the reliant markets (e.g. virtually every market) will hardly feel the impact.
Shipping is a very tiny percentage (1.5%) of global GHG emissions (2), so I'd be interested to hear if experts in other fields that are larger emitters (e.g. aviation, automotive, etc) feel about the feasibility of hitting zero GHG emissions.
1. http://www.imo.org/en/OurWork/environment/pollutionpreventio...
1) There is nothing sexy about the car. Tesla cars aren't just electric cars - they're also fantastic cars. Tesla makes a great (amazing?) car that is electric, rather than a an electric that may be a great car.
2) Yep, fueling infrastructure. You can charge your electric cars at home, at the office; the supercharger and battery swap stations; that Tesla (AFAIK?) charges your car for free... Where do you need to go to get hydrogen fuel?
There's also an analysis - maybe in the Wait, But Why? on Tesla - as to how you can't sell alternative vehicle stock from normal dealerships; it just doesn't make enough sense to the dealer, but ATM I don't remember the reasoning. Also AFAIK, Mr Musk has a good write-up on why hydrogen fuel isn't The Thing.
But mostly #1, IMO.
http://www.environment.act.gov.au/energy/growth-in-the-clean...
If you extract hydrogen from hydrocarbon, you're still bound to fossil fuel, and you have to build a hydrogen infrastructure.
If you do centralized electrolysis, you still need renewable energy to not be bound to fossil fuel, and you have to build a hydrogen infrastructure.
If you do decentralized electrolysis, i.e. you plug in your hydrogen car to charge it, you essentially have a battery that is slower, more expensive, and shittier than existing Li-ion batteries.
We have the infrastructure for electric cars already, they're more efficient than hydrogen cars, and they're cheaper to produce so why bother? It's extremely unlikely that the underlying economics and energy fundamentals will change, but if Toyota wants to dump billions into research - fine, I'm not going to stop them.
You also ignored the fact that filling a tank is more convenient and faster than charging a battery. Or that batteries have a limited lifespan.
If the economics don't work, why would the leading automaker that originates from an island without domestic fossil fuels bet on it?
You get less mileage/kWh from a system that consumes electricity and fills up fuel cell tanks, than a system that consumes electricity and charges on-board Li-ion batteries.
Filling a tank is absolutely convenient, but gasoline is safe at room temperature and normal atmospheric pressure. Liquid hydrogen isn't. And there's almost no hydrogen infrastructure in place. We have a lot of infrastructure for charging electric cars already, and charging stations are being built at a rapid pace to satisfy actual demand.
Toyota is spending a ton of Other People's Money on an interesting research project. The government of Japan is perfectly free to subsidize that if they feel like it, and I'm sure we'll get something useful and interesting out of it at the end, but fuel-cell cars are just not going to beat electric ones.
It was always a stupid idea. The economics don't make any sense at all.
that only works temporarily. business as usual still means consuming exponentially more resources over time, which is not sustainable.
#eatthesolarsystem
It's logical, it's clear - there's only one way to go from here
Without a doubt, the only way to go from here is out!Goods substitution happens, and it happens so fast you hardly notice it.
Various other environmental advances have happened through technology without requiring behavioral changes: removing lead from gasoline, removing CFCs from aerosols and so on.
We're globally at 2.36 births per woman, it dropped below 3.0 in the 90's. We'll probably reach world population stagnation in the 2050's.
I agree with your first point but disagree with the above in quotes. Climate change fundamentally changes the way many global hegemonies do business and make money. That trickles into politics via lobbying and influences what people think because of who they vote for. That's why Elon Musk's (and maybe the tech industry as a whole) capitalist approach to climate change is the best hope we have.
Yes!
If you make the most environmentally friendly alternative the cheapest, people will choose it, as if by magic.
If you make electric cars cheaper to own and operate than ICE cars, people will switch.
If you make solar power cheaper than coal, energy providers will switch.
If you make synthetic meat cheaper than real meat, there won't be any more factory farms and livestock slaughter.
If an at-home 3D printer can make your clothes and toys and stuff cheaper, you won't need to ship enormous amounts of containers with manufactured goods from China.
I don't know about that. It seems like moving to mostly-electric transportation and replacing coal and natural gas power plants with wind and solar isn't a huge lifestyle change.
That's not to say that such a change can be done quickly, nor it will be easy. We still have some unsolved problems like energy storage. But it's not like we all need to become hunter-gatherers and live in cob huts. I think that by implying that people are going to have to give up driving or not heat their houses in the winter in order to address climate change, we just make it that much harder to gain political support from those same people.
Don't worry. As the climate changes, it will fundamentally change how humans live on this planet. Oh you wanted to choose how we change. Well, then, I share your pessimism.
Now solar is cheap, coal seems incredibly unwieldy. Not just the poles and wires, but the mine, the railway to take the coal from the mine to the plant...
We are now a year or two past an inflection point -- building new coal plants at this time would seem like a much riskier investment. And that means the rate of construction is going to drop way below the rate of retirement pretty fast & pretty soon.
And because solar has high variability, it's going to get overbuilt (nobody wants their battery to go flat much, so it'll spend most of it's time full). ie, there is going to be a bunch of "spare power" lurking around that is effectively free.
And since a lot of problems can get turned into energy problems, that's a pretty happy place to be.
Rash prediction:
The Gold Coast currently has a mothballed desalination plant, and a water line from it to the South-East Queensland dams (built during the "Millenium drought"). I would not be surprised if within 30 years, it is running full-time, and pumping inland, even if the town-water dams are full -- because the marginal cost of running it instead of not-running it is zero, and with a bit more engineering the spill-over can be redirected to top up the Murray-Darling's flow. It'd require about 69kms of additional pipe, to connect Wivenhoe Dam to Cooby Dam. (Cooby Dam is in Toowoomba, which also has a bore into the Great Artesian Basin, so at that point you're inland enough to pump back into the basin. Draws from the basin have been blamed for the reduction in flows of springs that feed the Murray-Darling system...)
The quantities of water down a pipe might be small, in river terms, but if the marginal cost of power during periods of excess is zero, and seawater is free, then it might start to seem odd not just to leave it turned on whenever there's spare load...
Renewable energy becomes competitive in many places worldwide since ~1-2 years, which will fuel investments and change the way we generate energy. Not because of climate change, but because of economics. Batteries are vastly more efficient than a decade back. It doesn't need a huge invention for batteries to be competitive with ICEs in cars, a few more years at current development speeds will likely be enough.
It was started with investments by people worried about climate change, but once it's economic it will be adapted by (nearly) everyone.
I think that we can beat climate change without needing to convince people that they have to fight it. Sell a decent electric pick up with ample range in the US and the extra power you get from an EV, in combination with home charging (finding gas stations on the country side can be annoying) could easily make it the best selling vehicle in the US. And I'm pretty sure it won't take too long for Ford to bring exactly that to market.
Problem with the startup crowd is they tend to get the former better than the latter.
Would you mind telling me, how war you want to go on the second graph? Thx
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...
I think each one costs around $10 billion; I don't think 5 nuclear power plants will solve climate change.
You'd need 3 of those plants to replace all electrical generation on earth, assuming they're at a 95% capacity factor. So call it a trillion dollars, maybe. Then you've got to look at total energy usage, which is order of magnitude larger, at 120TWh, so you'd need 12 to supply every energy need of current civilization. Maybe ~$50 trillion all included.
So one year of the entire world's productive output.
That, and it hasn't exactly been proven to work stably yet (Note that the OP said fission, not fusion).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#/medi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Cu...
Note that at these prices it is cheaper to build solar, and in some cases (and places) solar AND pumped hydro power storage.
[1] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-as...
The priority is of course that it helps a company called YC make money, which should work. Keep in mind that this is the reason why companies are created and exist in the first place. It's called capitalism (and the reason for over-consumption, which lead us here). If it helps other people as well, then that is welcome, but not a priority.
It feels kind of fruitless to continue this discussion with two sides that just don't agree even on what the discussion is about.
So my suggestion to those who believe there is no way back; start companies that build solutions to some of the consequences you fear.
Note that while I'm related by marriage to one of the founders, I have no monetary stake in the company, so please don't take this as just a shill. I got to visit their (tiny) office where they're building the devices that generate the ozone, and it was just legitimately exciting to see what they were doing.
I may not be a founder of the company or anything, but I got a pretty good explanation and tour. So if anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.
Edit: here an in depth article about this subject: http://kb.marinedepot.com/article.aspx?id=10541
Normally toxicity like that would be a problem, but ozone is actually a highly unstable molecule. The reason it's toxic is because it is literally ripping other molecules apart to get components it wants to become completely safe oxygen. This property allows it to sanitize the water, and then leave the water completely drinkable and safe shortly after due to it completely transforming into something safe.
All jokes aside, this actually sounds really cool.
Breathing it is a different matter; it can do terrible damage to people's lungs.
But ingesting it in water doesn't seem to be a problem.
There have been solutions to this problem with urban farming practices with a combination of hydroponics and vermiponics for a number of years which can grow quite a bit of usable produce in a smaller land area using significantly less water.
Also, it could be useful to continue to break down these statistics by crop and water use. For instance, almond farms appear to take up nearly 10% of California's water use (http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/0...).
Doing so would lend credence to which crop would be most effective for first improving upon. This report appears to suggest that alfalfa is one of the neediest crops grown in California in terms of water consumption. There are obvious other crops as well, in terms of land area (Corn being one of them) but nevertheless it's worth noting. https://www.arb.ca.gov/fuels/lcfs/workgroups/lcfssustain/han...
Now, you might be asking, what is alfalfa for? Alfalfa is grown as a feed for animals, mainly dairy cows. Dairy cows eat roughly 70% of the alfalfa produced in the US. It's important to note that some alfalfa farmers tend to disagree that solutions like drip irrigation will work effectively enough - as it sometimes depends on the soil type and exposure to critters chewing up the pipes. (http://www.kpbs.org/news/2015/jul/03/how-one-california-alfa...)
In addition to this, we can also think about overall energy efficiency of consuming a product itself. For instance, potatoes yield more energy and protein than most crops grown.
Given the situation, if we want food we will have to pay the price in terms of water and land for producing the product used to produce that food.
The price subsidy encourages overconsumption, which causes the shortage.
Most places raise prices to fund desalination plants (if they have access to large bodies of water near the population centers, like California does), but that's why they don't. And given they won't do the obviously ideal strategy that works for everyone else in the world, it's been hard to get money from the struggling general budget to build the facilities. Why should every other department struggling for a budget to meet basic needs lose their chance because they won't adopt a simple price structure change?
Instead, non-renewable reserves are being depleted, as mentioned in the article.
The problem here isn't really technical in nature, though.
If the problem for California is one of policy, what endeavors can technology take on to help?
Improve water distribution in soil (I think there is a way to optimize this, varying by soil type and many other factors, that would minimize runoff). Or, get easier systems to recycle runoff. Ideally something with no/few moving or manufactured parts.
Reduce the cost of desalination plants and create a more realtime water market. Having one single water market would be a fundamentally technical task (albeit a complex one), but would level out prices, removing the incentive to make the policy mistakes.
Soil's water holding capacity can be increased through techniques like green mature and cover cropping. The permaculture approach to water is to slow it, spread it, and sink it.
There are also parts of the world where crop production doesn't make sense due to poor soil, erosion, water, climate, etc. Animal husbandry with good management practices is important and can help improve the functioning of these ecosystems. Now, whether we decide to eat these animals is another question.
The big reason I saw this as an opportunity is the huge investments Saudi Arabia and the surrounding region are investing in their own water supply, and the knowledge that California's water politics will push them in the same direction. While traditional desalinization will help, the costs in material and electricity are prohibitive for small players.
My hope is to work out a solution that takes less energy than traditional desalinization for the same amount of water, even with the transportation energy requirements.
A friend of mine and I (both marine engineering professionals in commercial shipping) did a Cost Benefit Analysis on chartering a handy size tanker, cleaning the tanks and shipping water from Alaska to California during the droubt. I no longer have the email that broke the costs down, but cleaning costs aside, the operational costs alone yielded $0.25/gal. The cost of H20 in Ca is about $0.002/gal (cheaper for farmers).
If you're looking to start an H20 ptoduction venture, you need to account for demand factors that will inform the type of product that is needed. For example, if the demand is geographically fragmented and/or geopolitical isolated (e.g. to remote villages in relatively undeveloped or oppressive nations) then a small and very cheap personal H20 generation technology is probably more cost feasible than creating a supply infrastructure.
Just calculate the cost/galon at the end user then compare to today's cost and you'll have your answer.
California's water is a repayment on the bond measure for building it's infrastructure back in the 60s. It's somewhere around 80% of the price of water. This is the largest reason for it's seemingly fixed cost and relative cheapness, even during the drought years. Under these circumstances a single tanker is simply a drop in the proverbial bucket.
What California's drought hurts is the entire state's total water carrying capacity year over year. Once that reaches a critical low, California will be spurred to take another water bond project of equal size. I predict this will fund desalinization plants along the coast.
Looking at the problem from this perspective, I'm estimating how much water is produced daily by a given plant. The question then becomes "Can I produce as much water as this plant for less money (loan/maintenance/electricity)?" I imagine this requires a dozen such tankers each day in Los Angeles harbor, each selling at half the cost per gallon.
Now this might be impossible to engineer cost wise because of the very math you mentioned. It also requires a staggering amount of water production, which itself might be impossible. The logistics of managing such an enterprise might crush the venture under it's weight. I'm still working through these assumptions.
Still, you've helped greatly because now I know the current cost to maintain a tanker. It's expensive, but that's a number I can attack to drive down.
*$0.25/gal cost should have read ~$0.15/gal.
Your average tractor trailer tanker may pick up diesel then switch to orange juice. As long as they put in 95% juice, that's legal.
It's buried in the CFR somewhere for the Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
"Ingestion of kerosene is harmful or fatal."
But there is a difference of about two orders of magnitude.
It's probably higher if you consider that I (well, we) flush toilets in commercial spaces, shower at our gyms etc.
I found a breakdown there: https://www3.epa.gov/watersense/pubs/indoor.html
This sounds totally stupid, but there has been previous work on the economics of towing icebergs to Australia for use as drinking water[1] as well as to Africa[2].
The numbers didn't work out then, but maybe now with higher efficiency solar power (and more advanced wind turbine design) the economics may have changed.
[1] http://www.abc.net.au/science/expert/realexpert/watercrisis/...
[2] http://www.scidev.net/global/water/news/icebergs-africa.html
Have you spoken with David Zetland? He's a really good guy for running ideas like this by.
The big problem is I'll not be anywhere close to that level of production for a decade at least. Large scale is quite doable conceptually, but the financial requirements are nearly that of a desalinization plant itself. I need to work my way up to such production.
But to follow that line of thought, I've been investigating FPSOs [1] because of their transportation and "mobile factory" to service the individual stills while out in the "field".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_production_storage_an...
Because the evaporation will create a larger percentage of salt, there is a concern that this would affect the local biology. This is double for any industrial accident that happens. However there is a large "Dead Zone" between South America and Australia [1] where both problems will be far away from any life.
The second is there is less commercial and personal ship traffic in that part of the world [2], lessening the possible collisions and other accidents because of wayward stills.
[1] http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/20080305_oceandeser...
[2] https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch1en/appl1en/mariti...
Maybe your solar stills could lower the albedo thru misting, thereby lowering the local temperature?
[0] http://yournewswire.com/nestle-ceo-water-is-not-a-human-righ...
Also, a political entity like the state is unlikely to arrive at an efficient price. Likely to still be underpriced due to political pressure.
There's a really good book by Fedrik Segerfeldt called "Water for Sale". I highly recommend checking it out. It goes over some possible public-private partnerships that could help expand water access and minimize excessive water usage.
https://smile.amazon.com/Water-Sale-Business-Market-Resolve/...
It gets a bit preachy at points, but its a quick read and goes over how to price water, investments that need to be made, etc
One of the biggest costs a peasant family currently has is the time it takes for the woman of the family to get to the well and back with water (in Uganda, it is always women doing this). She usually spends several hours each day doing so. Obviously, this situation is improved greatly if they're near the Nile or another river, but for those who are further afield they spend hours of potentially productive time fetching water.
An increase in the price of water could incentivize development of closer wells, better delivery methods, etc. by profit seeking companies, minimizing the time she spends going back and forth between the well and her house. She can spend that time working and generating income instead.
This will not improve household wealth in all cases, but I'm betting that something like this would help improve several of these families lots in life.
Sleep Dealer http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804529/
On a personal note, it really is amazing how little water one needs to shower with when using a bucket, as I once had to do while in Brazil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYoeHFJAyhU [3m50s]
Edit: It seems they're hiring, too. https://orbital-systems.com/en-eu/about-us/
It is more than just a capture/store system though. It taps into multiple sensors to determine how much water to use for given situations in order to not waste the water it does capture.
Honestly, I don't know how the cost would compare with desalination and wastewater recycling. Isn't desalination really expensive?
Could you give a walkthrough of how this works? I'm trying to get a better grasp on your prototype
Yes. I am in California so see the affect of the drought.
Do you mind if I send you an email to the address in your handle?
http://phys.org/news/2016-03-revolutionary-graphene-filter-c...
There is also nano-cellulose
http://phys.org/news/2016-02-nano-cellulose-filters-highly-e...
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-n...
In addition to high costs, nuclear power projects often face opposition from the public in developed democratic nations.
The region with highest current demand for desalination, Middle East/North Africa, is "blessed" with a lack of democracy. If the Saudi monarchy wants nuclear power they don't have to get voters on board -- no voting! But the costs are still high. And although Saudi Arabia would like to decrease its domestic fossil fuel consumption to free up more for exports, it doesn't want to accelerate a shift away from fossils elsewhere. IMO it's kind of a tightrope walk between advancing their own non-fossil energy sources, to grow/preserve export revenue, and avoiding a global shift away from fossils that could diminish their export revenue.
Given that water is 71% of the earth's surface[1], it seems like this is mostly a transportation problem.
We don't need to create water, unless that would make transport easer.
We don't need to filter water, unless that is easer to do then transporting it.
In the case of drought, the problem seems to be the transport of water, and near zero cost irrigation provided normally by rain.
Optimal water transportation seems to be the core problem to solve. With cost effective localized irrigation replacement for rain a subset related problem. (Perhaps if drought is more spacial than temporal, the irrigation solution could be temporary and mobil so as to move to areas of drought as needed).
So what ways can we think of to transport water? Or if that's not the core problem, then what is the right problem to solve?
I'm one in a long line of people who have looked into the failed idea[1] of buying an old single hull oil tanker, gutting the insides, cleaning and refitting, and running it between Sitka and LA filled with water. Much cheaper to produce in LA. Current sale price in LA is very low - largely due to state subsidies and lack of an actual water market, but thats unlikely to change soon. If you can lower the energy cost of transport its still likely cheaper to produce locally, due to high energy cost of desalination and wastewater recycling.
Large plastic bladders are another possibility for transportation. Just let the current take the bags down the coast and fix a GPS to the bag. Lots of issues with other boats destroying the bladders though, along with running aground, etc. Likely still cheaper to produce locally.
Only economic way to transport water currently is in water dense crops like rice, tomatoes, corn, most fruits, etc.
[1] http://www.treehugger.com/clean-water/us-company-set-to-ship...
Edit: To answer the question at the bottom of your post, the real problem is energy. If you lower the cost of energy production and storage, you've removed a huge chunk of water production costs. Focusing on water first is likely to lead nowhere.
What is the "cheaper to produce locally" method, and in what way is it not the solution?
Also, what about pipelines? Even if only useful in limited contexts (i.e. downhill, or open channels), or for very short distances.
That's a really good idea to transport water using large bladders. Perhaps you could even control movement as needed with small engine craft and nets. You'd need no where near the infrastructure of commercial shipping, yet bladders could be put in shipping containers as well.
See my other reply. In short, based on a CBA we did a few yrs back, fuel consumption alone using a diesel-powered handy size tanker to ship H20 from Alaska to Ca yields a shipping cost of ~$0.15/gal. Ca H20 costs <$0.002/gal. So, a factor of 75 more expensive.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'a different market', but I can address the latter:
Generally, commercial shipping will yield the greatest economies of scale for bulk cargo transport of any mode of transport (except perhaps pipeline - I'm not sure). You could use a larger tanker ( https://www.google.com/amp/s/oilandgaslogistics.wordpress.co...), like a ULCC that has 4X the displacement (cargo carrying capacity) as the handy size tanker we assessed. However, that would perhaps yield a ~50% cost reduction - far short of the ~99% reduction needed. https://project-firefly.com/node/19396 - this depicts containersips, but the exponential decay scale/cost relationship is similar for tankers.
Mechanisms that might be possible with water but not other shipped products, like towing icebergs, floating large bladders, pipelines etc.
The economics of commercial shipping has a lot of implied context that may not be relevant to moving fresh water.
But in any case, thanks helping me understand.
Reducing Opex can be done by chartering a foreign flag vessel (i.e. much cheaper than US flag - although you won't be able to trade H20 between US ports due to the Jones Act (1).
Here's a crazy idea for reducing fuel costs (the biggest Opex). You could employ H2 fuel cells + motor propulsion on your ship vice diesel engines. You might think that H2 fuel would be hazardous/infeasible to carry, which is correct. However, you could possibly skirt that issue employing an aluminum H2 generation system that generates H2 fuel on demand directly from water (sea or cargo) (2). This process oxidizes the aluminum until it is depleted, however, to refuel you could offload the containerized depleted Al ashore and load fresh Al. On shore, the depleted Al can be reconditioned (de-oxydized) via a solar or wind powered reconditioning plant (basically melt the Al to liberate the O2).
Thus, while a solar-cells generally don't have the necessary energy density to power a ship at typical transit speeds, this is one way to build a very clean solar/wind (albeit indirectly) powered fleet. The Capex might be a little high, but it's doable.
(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_Marine_Act_of_1920
(2) https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
Current methods of local production are desalination and wastewater recycling, both of which are heavily state subsidized, and in the case of wastewater recycling state owned. Very difficult to get into actual production of water. Most desalination companies actually just manage the desalination plants.
Pipelines have some potential, but in very limited cases. Could be useful in Caribbean though. Pipe water from Dominica to other Eastern Caribbean islands. I haven't run the numbers on that, but there might be some potential for an intrepid investor. Shallow water means its easy to lay and repair pipelines, every other island in the Caribbean being water deficient means demand. Might work.
Historically, humans settled near freshwater, and built civilizations. On every continent, metropolitan civilizations built aqueducts to carry clean water in from further away. Temporary water shortages (e.g. drought) were mostly weathered in-place, long-term shortages were often dealt with by migration, potentially including warfare.
The core problem is that people should be living near easily accessible freshwater, and if they aren't, it's either due to a historical grievance, poor planning, or (natural or anthropogenic) climate change.
"Freshwater makes up a very small fraction of all water on the planet. While nearly 70 percent of the world is covered by water, only 2.5 percent of it is fresh. The rest is saline and ocean-based. Even then, just 1 percent of our freshwater is easily accessible, with much of it trapped in glaciers and snowfields. In essence, only 0.007 percent of the planet's water is available to fuel and feed its 6.8 billion people."
http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/freshw...
We had charities digging wells and what it did is make it worse for many many people.
They had running water and with it came toilets with no treatment.
Fecal mater and water don't mix in nature it decomposes in drainage ditches it becomes a hotspot for bacteria and parasites.
A lot of the feel good water projects in Africa didn't pan out that well for the local population, they often bring deseases and contaminate the local water supply, brake down and actually reduce the water security.
If we want to give people access to readily available water we have to give them a full solution including what to do with the waste water and how to safely treat and recycle it.
With the addition of a minimum quality requirement?
Water water everywhere, and not enough to drink.
Note that the majority of municipal water systems include purification steps, not just transportation; waiting for nature to purify water for you doesn't suffice. I don't think transportation alone suffices; on average you'd have to go further and spend more to obtain already-pure water. That 71% includes a lot of seawater, river water, lake water, swamp water, and many other sources you wouldn't want to drink directly.
That doesn't mean we have a shortage of water, and transportation infrastructure remains a critical shortfall in many areas, but the problem involves many facets, including transportation, purification, and sanitation.
What percentage of YC investments are funded on a rolling basis?
On what basis where applications reviewed before?
What do you mean here by rolling basis?
And by the way, those biocides get into water supplies too.
- Monsanto's "roundup ready" line of breeds is resistant to their pesticide, with the idea that nothing else will be.
- GMO crops on average (world-wide? nation-wide?) are sprayed with less pesticides, implying "roundup ready" as an anomaly.
The takeaway is GM is a tool. I'm 100% for it, but like most tools it can be used for good or ill. Let's be careful, without implying the risks here are anything special compared to other powerful technology.
In the case of roundup ready crops, it sounds like it's both more effective as an herbicide and less toxic. The Wikipedia page didn't say whether that was toxicity towards humans. So in that sense roundup ready crops seem to be net better for the consumer anyway.
Jury seems to be still out on whether roundup is actually harmful, leaning on the no side at least according to the Wikipedia article on Glyphosate.
If you're interested in the topic, I'd encourage you to read about the most common GMO crops encountered by consumers, the primary biocides used on those crops, and then read in vivo studies on those biocides.
Do your own research and be discerning about the sources and data, there is an immense amount of astroturfing on the subject matter.
http://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12940-0...
https://people.csail.mit.edu/seneff/2016/Glyphosate_V_glycin...
http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/iarcnews/pdf/MonographVol...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=glyphosate
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=2,4-d
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carey-gillam/tests-show-monsan...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/17/pesticid...
Of course it could all be wrong, biocides could be super healthy and amazingly great for human consumption.
Water is a problem in many places. I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies and have worked on a bunch of water well projects (and have in fact been working on a water project today). They're much more interesting and technically sophisticated than you might imagine, and water tables have been dropping in much of the country. Wells are also easily fouled. Fracking has been a problem for water wells in many parts of the country.
USGS has much of the better and more useful data about water quality: https://water.usgs.gov/nawqa/studies/domestic_wells.
Right now, wells cost a lot of money to drill—often more than $10K—and are easy to screw up. That may be part of the reason YC is looking for water-related startups.
Besides California, and staying in the US, water is also an issue everywhere in the Southwest (Colorado River basin, a quarter-million square miles), and throughout the agricultural midwest, from Nebraska to Texas, where water is being over-drafted from shallow portions of the continent-scale Ogallala Aquifer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer#Aquifer_water...).
Doesn't seem that amazing when you consider that in both cases people are trying to protect themselves against a perceived threat - the science has little to do with it, other than as a tool.
Also, to be fair, most of food science is hardly worthy of the name. We can barely tell what makes a healthy diet in general. How can any scientist worthy of the name say that all GMO's are safe for long term, regular human consumption when they can't even say that about non-GMOs? (see disagreements about whether something as simple as refined sugar or meat should be a regular part of a healthy diet)
https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/statistics/
Are water-thrifty GMO variants of those crops commercially available? Have they been rejected in California due to GMO-fear? The answer to both needs to be "yes" to blame GMO fearmongering for California's water problems. (I don't disagree that fear of GMOs is overblown, but original comment gave no evidence it's causing the CA water problems.)
Imagine doing that to your food population all the while enforcing draconian IP laws on farms not using such products, but caught up in the wind.
Whenever I look into this, it seems that all the brine questions revolve around how to dispose of it in a safe manner, or how to re-introduce it gradually to the sea.
Why can't we turn brine into table salt, or use it in some industrial process?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_salt_prod...
Seawater contains ~3% sodium chloride by mass:
http://www.seafriends.org.nz/oceano/seawater.htm
2015 desalination rates of 86.8 million cubic meters per day would produce 950 million tonnes of sodium chloride per year (86.8 * 365 * 0.03):
http://idadesal.org/desalination-101/desalination-by-the-num...
Potential salt supplied from desal dwarfs demand. The excess, which is most of it, will be dumped.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seawater [2]: http://projects.scpr.org/applications/monthly-water-use/los-...
(It basically works like this: You have two containers with water of different salinities, connected with a membrane that only lets the water pass, but not the salt. The water will move through the membrane to balance the salinity - osmosis - and one container will have a rising water level, which can be used to generate electricity with turbines.)
I don't know about California, is all the fresh water fully recycled until the rivers are dry? That would be hard to imagine.
Also, see http://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/road-salt-winters-2-...
Dassault was working on "Project Ice Dream" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL5blnAH9xw - which centered on tugboats to move ice bergs around... sails would probably work too.
This also doubles as large-scale cargo transportation between continents, for cargo that can tolerate a 6 month journey. An awful lot of cargo can fit on an ice berg with a surface area of many hundreds of square kilometers.....
more: http://gnusha.org/logs/html/2016-11-22.log.html#t20:04-166
Not easy. This was a problem my high school math tutor, a glaciologist discussed with me one evening doing some applied math. cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12341964
Water scarcity became a major policy issue for them around the time they were kicked out of the Malaysian Federation in the 60s, probably because their main water supply is located in Malaysia... They currently have the capacity to satisfy 30% of their water demand using 'reclaimed water' (i.e. recycled) and 10% using desalinated. Although I don't think they actually need to fully utilise these capacities as 50-75 per cent of their water needs are met by man-made rainfall catchments [0].
I realise how strange it is to say 'just go have a chat with the Singaporean government', but I suspect they'd be happy share their expertise. My sketchy understanding is that Singapore has found that 'reclaimed' (i.e. recycled) water is far more cost-effective (and cleaner) compared to desalinated water.
And despite being a semi-benevolent autocracy, the Singaporean government has had to work pretty hard to convince their population that there's nothing wrong with drinking recycled water (i.e. water that previously had poop in it). Learning how they overcame this issue could be valuable...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...
Super cool startup working on minimising water usage through increasing the surface area/volume ratio of water droplets while taking a shower.
Not sure how exciting of a startup idea it is to buy up and preserve large tracks of land containing water and aquifers, though.
Build out massive solar and wind power capacity and create electricity for the grid. Use specially designed desalination plants which operate well at low utilization and significant swings in production to smooth out the peaks in the solar / wind production curves. Excess power is converted into clean water. Water seems like a reasonably good place to "store" the value of the energy you just created. Furthermore, what is the value of having a somewhat more predictable power supply from solar and wind resources?
Failures of the Private Water Industry
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/03/opinion/failures-of-the-pr...
I wonder if there's any public funding of water system research?
"Beat" climate change ? I think you people totally misunderstand the problem then.
The reason it's happening in the first place is very simple and we all know it: mindless, senseless, useless consumption of everything.
Armies of methodically brainwashed "consumers" unleashed upon the limited world around them - under the war drums of advertising and marketing.
Water tech will help, but it will not fix climate change...
You can't "beat" climate change without addressing the elephant in the room.
Now that's a truly "hard" problem.
Devices like the LifeStraw [1], the LifeSaver bottle [2], the WaterIsLife straw [3], and the SteriPEN [4], are nice, but they're pricey. Any ways of reducing the cost?
[1] http://lifestraw.com/ [2] http://www.iconlifesaver.eu/ [3] http://waterislife.com/clean-water/the-straw [4] https://www.steripen.com/
One of the big things is not just to optimize water, but optimize the whole problem which water is one part of.
http://vintagevalueinvesting.com/how-to-invest-in-water-like...
> We’re now reviewing applications on a rolling basis, so you can apply here now.
However the "Apply page" is highly misleading:
> please submit your application online by 8 pm PT on October 4
So are water applications on a rolling basis or all of them?
Another thing to think about - why move to the Bay Area? Water is not a software problem; water is an infrastructure, political, energy intensive (we're talking drinking water, right?), and most importantly cost prohibitive problem.
What does moving to the Bay Area get you in this arrangement - besides access to YC people?
Source: I work at a startup in the bay area doing materials science research.
What's the startup?
Basically you need cheap, replaceable solar-pumps (that one is allready doable).
And you need cheap, near surface volumes dug out and sealed. Actually all you need for that is - a water pump and a glorified fridge. You drill a initial hole- and now you pump water in and freeze it. Water expands, you thaw it and repeat. Basically a giant intentional pothole.
Now, anyone here into tunnel engineering? How to cheaply seal the resulting artificial cavern?
No, we need to act urgently to stop climate change; saying only "We're optimistic" sends the message that it's not a critical problem that needs urgent attention.