No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
I suppose the question is, what does a bucket of water cost if it comes from the groundwater or the next mountains/lake and what does it cost if it comes from a multi-million desalination facility... I mean even if the energy is free (which it's not) the whole plant has to be built, staffed and maintained. And having an expensive factory sit around idle during the night and peak power and just operational from 10am to 3pm isn't economical and makes the water that comes out of it even more expensive. And regular water is cheap. Even after being carried around by trucks in the worst case.
If it's too expensive compared to normal water, no-one is going to buy it. And the millions of dollars invested in the desalination plant won't get a return. And then it's just throwing money out of the window. It could be cheaper to just discard the exess energy than invest millions into something that doesn't sell. And then you could throw good money after bad and try to subsidize the effort. But I don't think it's viable unless it's a desert or some other geological factors rule out other water sources.
In other words, green technology is not feasible from an economic standpoint. Did you factor in the effects of global warming or the cost of depleting known waterways/systems?
I mean you also have to factor in the carbon footprint of the concrete that goes into the desalination facory. And producing solar panels also isn't light on the planet. It's going to be a complicated equation. But large factories like desalination plants plus the energy also don't come without consequence for the planet. Even more so if they're underutilized. I'm not sure if that counts as "green" anymore. The technology is probably neither feasible from an economic standpoint, nor from an ecological one.
By your estimation.
Sure. I'm not a professor for water treatment. But I haven't heard any of them advocate for this, so there might be a reason to it. And with the constraint, it has to be powered just by excess solar energy, I'm pretty sure I'm right. That might change if you find cheap regenerative energy that runs the plant 24/7 and there are other geological factors that make alternative water sources less attractive. But there is no way it'll work like this. And I mean we use lots of water everyday. Not just in the house, but also for farming and whatnot. You're going to need a massive amount of energy to have a noticeable impact and save other water sources. And solar doesn't have a particularly good carbon footprint. There are lots of reasons why my estimation might be closer to the truth. (For current technology, of course.) The desalinated water will come with a carbon footprint and a price. And both of them might not be favorable.