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The developer for water and energy projects based in the United States Oceanus Power & Water, through its subsidiary, Oceanus Energía y Agua de Sudamerica, has announced the signing of a cooperation agreement with the French energy company EDF to explore various possibilities and conditions for the implementation of the first IPHROCES project in Latin America, with a main focus on the Andes Region.
The IPHROCES (Integrated Pump Hidro Reverse Osmosis Clean Energy System) solution aims to provide energy storage services and desalinated water from the same installation. Specifically, it integrates energy storage through hydraulic pumping plants with seawater and desalination by reverse osmosis to guarantee the production of drinking water 24 hours a day.
According to its creators, IPHROCES has the potential to provide long-term, low-cost energy storage, allowing excess wind or solar energy to be stored and then generated during periods of high demand.
Environmentally, IPHROCES manages to reduce emissions since the energy supplied for the water pumping and desalination process comes from renewable energies, and the environmental footprint on the coastline is significantly lower than traditional Reverse Osmosis.
In a report collected by the Chilean Ministry of Finance already in 2018, the Oceanus company explained that the energy consumption of the desalination plant is the lowest in the market for Reverse Osmosis, since it uses “energized water” from the reservoir and, with this, the reverse osmosis process starts with around 400 Psi of pressure, without the need for pumps to reach this pressure.
The fresh water that is produced has the lowest cost compared to other desalination projects in the world that use Reverse Osmosis. This is only possible due to the reduction of operational costs, specifically the reduction in energy consumption, which for IPHROCES is around 2 KWh / m3.
The pumped storage solution is also advantageous to balance the low plant factor or intermittency of renewable energies, since it generates energy at peak times with response times of less than 5 min, providing stability to the network.
Both EDF and Oceanus plan to explore opportunities for the development of IPHROCES projects wherever there are large consumption centers in semi-arid coastal regions, but have not provided information on when and where the project will take place. |
