“Weather issues have been a problem, boiling a few kettles to concentrate the brine is far more efficient and effective than hoping that every day of the year“
Well, let’s dig into this a bit deeper...
Solar evaporation rates in the triangle typically average 4-8mm/day based on a thesis I found via google.
Let’s call it 5mm/day for the sake of running some numbers.
700 ha of ponds is big!
That is 7,000,000 square metres.
At 5mm/day, that’s about 35,000,000 litres per day of evaporation.
How much energy does it take to evaporate water..?
Google tells me it is more that 2,000kJ per litre.
How much is that for 35,000,000 litres?
That’s 70,000,000,000 kJ.
So, “boiling the kettle” to achieve the same result in one day would require
70,000,000,000 / (24h x 60m x 60s)
= 810,185 kW
= 810 MW
That is a lot of power!
Wikipedia tells me that at about 1 ha/MW, you would need a solar farm that covers about 800 ha just to generate this power!
That’s bigger than the 700ha of ponds!
Solar farm cost appears to be between about $1 and $2 per W, or about $1-2m per MW.
So, at least $800m to build a solar farm to power the kettles!
It doesn’t add up to me, and happy to be corrected on any of the above numbers!
Of course this is based on the “simple” task of evaporating the brine, and does not consider the other process that occur within the ponds, or indeed that “alt tech” is not reliant on the same concentration process via evaporation...
It’s just a back of the envelope calc to highlight the scale of energy involved here, and shows that you can’t economically just “turn on the kettle” instead!
I am hopeful that there is a suitable alternative tech to the traditional ponds and processing, that obviously doesn’t rely on the same level of evaporation!
Cheers
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