this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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It's not -a lot- of electricity ... a couple of thousand kWh per day. It's also used to de-salinate ocean water ... of which there's plenty.

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[–] Shortstack@reddthat.com 29 points 4 days ago (1 children)

The reason being that dumping the brine back into the ocean creates a dead zone wherever that dump point is, since the relative concentration of salts is higher compared to regular seawater.

They’re almost certainly recreating seawater just to help alleviate the dead zone effect and figured out how to get some free electricity out of it too

[–] porksnort@slrpnk.net 19 points 4 days ago

Right. It seems analogous to regenerative braking in a gas/electric hybrid car. The momentum is turned back into electricity to reclaim potential energy. Some of the energy was already spent in RO stage and this process gets some of it back.