Impact of H2O water award

its all very nice but it does ...

its all very nice but it does not provide answers to some critical questions. 1. can this technology be used in smaller configurations/plants? Water security is paramount, especially in the Persian gulf where 95% of all drinking water comes from desalination. According to experts and recently reported in the New York Times ( http://nyti.ms/dLLRF1 ), the water production infrastructure (which is largely composed of large fossil fuel powered de-sal plants) has less than a 4 day reserve if there was a catastrophic failure in the system. I do not remember the number of plants but they are large and centralized enough that if 1-3 were destroyed it would result in a major disruption of the economy and everyday life. Give the current geo-political events going on in the Gulf and MENA this kind of disruption is not out of the question. Besides the effect on indigenous residents there is also the effect on the US Military which has part of its CENTCOM operation in Qatar & Bahrain. Technology is great but it is time to start thinking about decentralized water processing that provides both sustainability and security. 2. Long term dependence on Fossil fuels - RO desal plants require lots of energy to operate. They speak to the use of monitoring in order to better manage energy costs. Monitoring systems based on M2M technologies can make most processes more efficient - my curiosity is whether the membrane itself operates more efficiently. The energy question though is a much larger discussion, much like security, to this I would suggest people read the German Aerospace Study specifically on Desal strategies in MENA ( http://bit.ly/sI8K2 ) The Germans believe that the only way to solve the problem in the long term is through concentrated solar powered solutions - primarily given increased economic development and population growth - that coupled with what the they believe will be past peak oil by 2030. 3. Not so much a question but a comment. We need to get past the large, centralized thinking that dominates the world of water production. ABB, GE, et al, dominate this world - today, but the effort should be made to find new, smaller, sustainable solutions to the problem of both desalination and purification. In many ways this thinking is not disimilar to the world of data processing 30-40 years ago when large centralized mainframes ruled. Very expensive, complex install and maintenance, which in 20 years was blown away by the advent of the PC, distributed networking and finally the internet. Energy and by extension water should be seen as "content" and content can be efficiently produced by communities working together in a distributed fashion to achieve sustainable ends. just a thought.

Published February 16, 2011 22:13 by Ron Pettengill, Epiphany Solar Water Systems - CEO