Sir,
In his letter last week (‘Solving Cyprus’ water crisis’, Letters, November 9), Mr Teague writes he wants the island to ship more water from Greece and use imported gas to crack sea water, as his solution to the supply problem, over local ‘green’ solutions validated by German studies, US installations and accredited for EU grants. This island is now finally at the stage of appointing a director for the purpose of fulfilling its approved EU grant obligations for hopefully the first of many solar powered desalination plants.
In my seven years here, I have never seen anyone even once cleaning their domestic solar water heater panels due to any “high maintenance requirements” (sic), even though we suffer from Saharan dust storms regularly, and the cost of importing, storing and using ‘non-green’ gas supplies (even from LUKoil) are not equitable, my green recommendations are:
Solar panels: there is a proven factory in China that makes the electric cell converter panels run by an accredited professor, which could supply a ‘low-tech’ solution to cover enough area for a low maintenance solar power plant for a local supplementary supply for each town. A simple ‘slot in-slot out’ mount for each panel can be replicated for the whole installation in the event of repair and the panel swapped out in a matter of minutes. Very low maintenance.
Costs of replacement is low because the panels last for many years, maybe even 20. The only issues requiring insurance would be against hail, storm/earthquake damage and maybe sabotage. Daily amounts of solar power can be directed for desalination – or ‘cracking’ as its called, and the water stored nearby for consumption.
The current desalination technology on the island is very outdated and expensive to run and was built (in case you don’t know) as a defendable military model back-up in case natural supplies were compromised.
For the cracking plant, the inlets for sea water supply would best be located under the sea, in porous limestone saline water aquifers. This supply is filtered by limestone rock strata below the seabed and naturally cleans and replenishes the supply before it gets to the cracking plant. Most of the heavy metals will already be rock-filtered out, leaving a much cleaner suspension for final filtering or distillation.
My primary concern today, however, is the long term environmental effect of recycling concentrated brine outflow. The only current solution is to use a chilled pipe directed into many of the seismic crevasses around the island, where the solids would be able to deposit over time.
Random saline recycling would have a real and bad effect on marine ecology. No circular acceptable solution is available at the present. Maybe your readers have ideas they wish to share about this vital issue.
I would recommend a condensation plant strategy, which uses sea wind to condense its saline clean moisture on an industrial scale collector array, cooled by pumped sea water. There is no saline outflow, and only small amounts of residue, the same as from rain water.
In each case, these are local coastal solutions, which are built to redirect natural supplies to inland towns.
Tommy Dee,
Aradippou
