Solar Water Desalination by Heliostat

What's the Idea

The idea is there's plenty of water there - and the technology to handle it has been available for years, but Australia has not been clever enough to use it.

Other countries have been processing brackish water since the 1950's and the information is not secret.

In fact, the know-how is there to get fresh water at a cheaper price than Australians are used to - it is not hard to... more

You ask me for a drink of water.

I say sure, it's nice and cold - but it is re-cycled sewerage - is that Ok?

Why do people spend so much time trying to justify re-cycled sewerage???

Would you drink it if you had a choice?

Well you have... more

DIY Desalinator

Yes, everybody knows that you just can't do that...

It's too expensive - it's too complicated - only a government can do it.

Well, take a look at this for an idea... more

The technology has been around for centuries. Sure, with modern optics and electronics it can work a lot better, but it still isn't rocket science... more

There are commercial fresh water generators that run from waste heat - yep, that's right - not nuclear powered, or even coal fired - just waste.

Just reject heat that we chuck away and pretend we can afford to waste it.

For instance ships use the heat from their exhaust pipes... more

Solar Power

The holy grail of Solar Energy seems to be generating electricity.

And that may be so, but at the moment we don't have good technology for that. It's too expensive and it's too inefficient.

Why not use solar for what it does naturally? And that's heat... more

More Ideas

Something Australia does really well is agriculture. But we are limited by water. Could we recover gas well water using solar power and use it to... more

But some established agricultural lands are suffering from salt degradation. We could use this cheap solar desalinator to extract the salt to rehabilate the land, and at the same time re-cycle the water... more

Could we build desalination plants somewhere south of Fraser Island and push water over into the Murray Darling catchment... more

It would be smaller than the Snowy Mountains Scheme, and we did that one in the 50's.

And none of this has any greenhouse emission.