PAKISTAN is short of water. It doesn’t have the required number of dams which it should’ve got by now. It missed the opportunity of making Kalabagh dam owing to the short-sightedness and vested interests of the politicians. In Karachi and Gwadar, water shortage can be overcome to a great extent if we install desalination plants.

Desalination is the process of removing salt from seawater. By installing a desalination plant, saline water of the sea is turned into fresh, drinkable water. More than 18,000 desalination plants operate in 150 countries, including US, China, India, Saudi Arabia, Gulf States, etc.

It is said that people are hesitant to install desalination plants owing to excessive consumption of electricity, as electricity cost is more than half the cost of operating a water desalination plant. But, this cost can be avoided if we generate electricity from solar energy which is now one of the cheapest modes of energy the world over.

Today, about 10 to 13 billion gallon water is desalinated worldwide per day. The current methods require about 14 kilowatt-hours of energy to produce 1,000 gallons of desalinated seawater.

It’s said that desalination plants use excessive electricity to run. This problem can be solved by installing solar panels to generate electricity which in turn can run the desalination plant. Efforts are now on to produce a modular solar system where users could order as many panels as they needed based on their daily water demands.

One wonders why the idea of installing desalination plants in Karachi and Gwadar didn’t occur to the respective provincial governments.

Air Cdre (r) Azfar A Khan

Karachi

Published in Dawn, August 26th, 2018