BUSINESS LEADER
Oceanus’s Hybrid Pumped-Storage Desalination Facility
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esalination plants typically deal with two major problems: the desalination process requires a large amount of energy, and it results in a large amount of brine, which is difficult to get rid of and can be harmful to the natural environment. Oceanus Power and Water has discovered an innovative solution to both of these problems: combining a pump-storage facility, which stores power in the form of elevated water that can be used to drive turbines, with a desalination facility. Gravity power alone can dramatically reduce the energy demands of the desalination process. Moreover, the resulting brine can be reinjected into the stored seawater as it is released back into the ocean, diluting it on site. In this interview, Neal Aronson, the founder and chief executive officer of Oceanus, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about his company’s energysaving, environmentally friendly concept, and the design of its planned facilities. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
24 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER
PHOTOS COURTESY OF OCEANUS POWER AND WATER.
Neal Aronson: My background is in real estate, particularly in the development of large master-planned communities and projects in the western United States. I did that for about 25 years on and off. We did everything from new town development to greenfield development to resorts. We dabbled in offices, entertainment, and residential developments. I ended up as the chief financial officer of the company I worked for. Around the time of the great recession, I decided to move into energy development. In the last few years of my work in real estate development, we were greening all our projects with solar and wind energy and water conservation, so I had been exposed to a lot of the new energy initiatives, especially those in California. As you can imagine, when you develop large projects, you have to construct all the energy, water, and wastewater infrastructure. The last few years of my work in real estate development focused a lot on those aspects of our projects. In 2012, I moved into solar energy and worked on a solar development in Northern California. Solar is basically just another asset class of land development. It was interesting work. I had a project located on federal land adjacent to a large water storage facility—a pumped-storage facility that was operated for water supply rather than for energy
generation. The juxtaposition of the two and the obvious and growing need for solar energy and storage in California made me think. I’m from Silicon Valley, with Tesla in the backyard, so to speak, so I was exposed to batteries early in my Neil Aronson. energy education. I quickly concluded that while batteries are great for cars, for short-term corporate or industrial needs, and even sometimes for residential consumers, they are not appropriate for grid-scale storage. In addition, they are expensive and will probably remain so for years to come, they have a limited life cycle, and they’re environmentally hazardous. The idea of developing a pumped-storage facility in California was intriguing to me. The general concept of a pumped-storage system is like that of any battery: the storage of electricity for later use. Rather than use a reversible chemical reaction to store the electricity, as is typical of a solid-state battery, a pumped-storage system uses off-peak and surplus electricity to pump seawater to a higher elevation where it is stored until required. When there is demand for electricity, seawater is released from this elevated storage reservoir to flow downhill through the penstocks to the powerhouse, where it drives a turbine coupled to an electrical generator to produce electricity. My background in large projects made me eager to develop a facility like this in California. I ran across a seawater pumped-storage project that had been developed on the Japanese island of Okinawa around the turn of this century. It proved that you could put a pumped-storage facility on the ocean, with the ocean being your lower reservoir, and successfully manage the corrosion and biofouling caused by seawater. That was an inspiration. There is a lot of coastline around the world in semiarid regions, including in California, that could provide a good location for this sort of facility.
