Spain Is Thirsty. Here’s How It Gets Water
By Stanley Reed and Rachel Chaundler, The New York Times.
Excerpt: ...tourists filled the cafes and hotel rooms along Spain’s Mediterranean coast, including in Torrevieja, a small city of tightly stacked apartment blocks running along a curved beach. ...low-slung structures house a vast network of pipes, pumps and tanks in a plant that performs a kind of alchemy crucial to the economy of this part of Spain: drawing huge volumes of water from the sea, removing the salt and creating more than 60 million gallons of fresh water a day. Acciona, a Spanish company that built the plant, says the facility can supply water for 1.6 million people through the process known as desalination. For much of the year, though, the output is largely used to nurture oranges, lemons and other crops for consumers in Northern Europe. The Torrevieja plant is the largest of its kind in Europe, and similar plants dot the Spanish coastline. ...With nearly 100 big plants, Spain is the largest user of desalination in Europe and one of the world’s largest. In many other countries, including Australia, China and Israel, reliance on desalination for drinking water and other needs is increasing. ...the costs of operating the energy-intensive desalination technology — called reverse osmosis, which is standard at large plants including the one at Torrevieja — are being brought down by pairing water purification with cheap solar energy, encouraging the building of new plants....