Whatever happened to Kamen's "Slingshot" water purifier? [1] It was a little vapor compression distillation unit powered by a Stirling cycle engine. There was a tabletop-sized model, and a shipping-container sized model. There were announcements of field tests. Heavy PR around 2012, then silence.
There were a few demo installations, but it never appeared as a volume product. There's a similar technology from Simon Frasier University.[2] They're looking for someone to commercialize it.
A YC startup might start by deploying that technology in East Porterville, CA, where the wells have gone dry.
The Israeli desalination plant "Sorek can produce a thousand liters (264 gal) of drinking water for 58 cents." And it can produce 624Km3/day or 150M m3 of water a year. That's 20% of Israeli domestic consumption.
That's $0.002 per gallon, about what CA water costs. All fresh from the sea.
75X cheaper than the 0.15 cents per gallon @mojomark estimates in the thread below that it would cost in fuel costs alone for a tanker to ship water from alaska.
I can't tell exactly, but the $0.58/1000 liters seems to be amortizing the $400M investment cost, because it's on a 25 year Build - Operate - Transfer contract.
I don't share a strong sense of optimism that we'll 'beat climate change'. We need to fundamentally change how humans live on this planet and interact with our ecosystems to move past issues like this. Projects like these will certainly help a lot of people in the near-term, but I fear they distract us from addressing the real problems. Sadly, the real problems don't have much of a financial incentive to be solved.
>>We need to fundamentally change how humans live on this planet
If anyone wonders why some resist accepting climate change as a fact, the above statement gets to a big piece of the underlying puzzle. I strongly suspect that if climate change was merely a scientific topic, there would be little-to-no resistance to accepting it as fact.
But it's not just a scientific question, it's (been made into) a question of how humans fundamentally live on the planet. And so of course a subset of society is going to resist societal change. It's not that people are particularly stupid, it's that they don't like the fundamental changes to how they live that they believe will follow.
Of course, we all know all of this, but for some reason we like to pretend we don't.
In my personal opinion, if you truly care about stopping climate change, you should be spending our effort developing solutions that do NOT require fundamental changes in how humans live on this planet. That path is much more likely to be successful in the political realm and thus more likely to actually save the planet.
I think Tesla and Solar City are excellent examples of this. They're not "stop driving, turn off your house lights, etc", they're "keep doing what you do, only now greener"
Of course, issues with the greenlieness of electric cars, etc etc - but remember when solar panels were a net negative? AFAIK, that sure as hell didn't last.
> I think Tesla and Solar City...They're not "stop driving, turn off your house lights, etc", they're "keep doing what you do, only now greener"
Agree 100%! A few years ago Chevron ran an add campaign in DC metro depicting people saying things like "I will use less water" and "I will bike to work" and that shit made my blood boil. Every day I thought to myself "No assholes - how about you supply energy that isn't filthy!"
You can do both: limit your energy consumption and make your energy cleaner. One does not preclude the other.
Given that pretty much all of our current energy sources have a carbon cost (e.g. in the production of solar panels), it makes sense to try to limit our consumption too.
I do agree. My issue was with the single-sidedness of Chevron's campaign. To me it implied that energy consumers are the primary cause of environmental woes.
Speaking for my industry only (commercial shipping), if companies were willing to sacrifice some profit & growth, commercial ships could all operate virtually free of harmful GhG emissions. This is technically possible today.
However, given the fragmentation and overcapacity that currently exists, the international competition is too fierce for any company to make such a leap for the general good. This is why IMO MARPOL emission regulations to include Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI) and Emission Control Areas (ECAs) are so critical - because it says to companies "hey, it's o.k. to spend a little extra on CAPEX and OPEX, because everyone else has to also." (1)
Given what is possible today with available technology, however, I think the emission control cap tiers are far too conservative. The final tier (in a few decades) should be zero GhG emissions for all shipping. It is feasible - and really with overcapacity where it is, now is the best time to take the plunge because the reliant markets (e.g. virtually every market) will hardly feel the impact.
Shipping is a very tiny percentage (1.5%) of global GHG emissions (2), so I'd be interested to hear if experts in other fields that are larger emitters (e.g. aviation, automotive, etc) feel about the feasibility of hitting zero GHG emissions.
It's strange to me that Toyota has a hydrogen fuel car in production and for sale today, but it gets almost no attention in discussions like this one. Why is that? Are the CO2 effects of liquid hydrogen extraction a barrier? Or maybe the need to establish a network of hydrogen fuel delivery?
1) There is nothing sexy about the car. Tesla cars aren't just electric cars - they're also fantastic cars. Tesla makes a great (amazing?) car that is electric, rather than a an electric that may be a great car.
2) Yep, fueling infrastructure. You can charge your electric cars at home, at the office; the supercharger and battery swap stations; that Tesla (AFAIK?) charges your car for free... Where do you need to go to get hydrogen fuel?
There's also an analysis - maybe in the Wait, But Why? on Tesla - as to how you can't sell alternative vehicle stock from normal dealerships; it just doesn't make enough sense to the dealer, but ATM I don't remember the reasoning. Also AFAIK, Mr Musk has a good write-up on why hydrogen fuel isn't The Thing.
The economics just doesn't work out, and will never work out.
If you extract hydrogen from hydrocarbon, you're still bound to fossil fuel, and you have to build a hydrogen infrastructure.
If you do centralized electrolysis, you still need renewable energy to not be bound to fossil fuel, and you have to build a hydrogen infrastructure.
If you do decentralized electrolysis, i.e. you plug in your hydrogen car to charge it, you essentially have a battery that is slower, more expensive, and shittier than existing Li-ion batteries.
We have the infrastructure for electric cars already, they're more efficient than hydrogen cars, and they're cheaper to produce so why bother? It's extremely unlikely that the underlying economics and energy fundamentals will change, but if Toyota wants to dump billions into research - fine, I'm not going to stop them.
I'm still not convinced. At the end of the day, liquid hydrogen is a better energy store than any existing battery tech. All the issues you listed are the same for electric cars--reliance on fossil fuels, need to build infrastructure, etc.
You also ignored the fact that filling a tank is more convenient and faster than charging a battery. Or that batteries have a limited lifespan.
If the economics don't work, why would the leading automaker that originates from an island without domestic fossil fuels bet on it?
You have to do the full systems analysis, you can't just look at the numbers of liquid hydrogen in isolation.
You get less mileage/kWh from a system that consumes electricity and fills up fuel cell tanks, than a system that consumes electricity and charges on-board Li-ion batteries.
Filling a tank is absolutely convenient, but gasoline is safe at room temperature and normal atmospheric pressure. Liquid hydrogen isn't. And there's almost no hydrogen infrastructure in place. We have a lot of infrastructure for charging electric cars already, and charging stations are being built at a rapid pace to satisfy actual demand.
Toyota is spending a ton of Other People's Money on an interesting research project. The government of Japan is perfectly free to subsidize that if they feel like it, and I'm sure we'll get something useful and interesting out of it at the end, but fuel-cell cars are just not going to beat electric ones.
Interesting. I appreciate this thoughtful discussion! I live in Nagoya, Japan (near Toyota HQ) and I've yet to see a Mirai in the wild except at the dealerships.
The fuel cell in Toyota's car is expensive enough that it's an expensive, not very nice, and not very performant car. Combine that with the inconvenience of few hydrogen filling stations, and you've got lack of interest from consumers and the press.
Population growth is leveling out and even dropping in countries with higher living standards. Maybe once everyone's living in tech paradise, the human population will stop growing altogether. We'll still probably have more stuff per capita than today, but it won't continue to grow unbounded as people seem to think today.
Unless you begin to also produce exponentially greater resources over time. Also, temporarily is still a good thing, and will make new resources stretch longer.
Humans have some success in changing their behavior, for example in moving from 5-6 children per family to 2. That change has staved off much more catastrophic effects of population growth and its impact on climate. But it needed technology advances to happen first, namely birth control.
Various other environmental advances have happened through technology without requiring behavioral changes: removing lead from gasoline, removing CFCs from aerosols and so on.
People not living in the developed world still average much more than 2 children. I think the number is reducing there but it has a way to go to reach average 2 per family.
And we're in the process of rapidly developing the 'undeveloped' world. It's not unreasonable to assume that within 50 years everyone on the planet will live in 'first world' conditions.
Indeed - it goes against everything we know about human nature. Have humans ever spontaneously and independently changed their own behavior, at their own inconvenience, en masse? No - not without strong economic, social, or legal incentives to do so. The gains we make in these areas are pretty much all going to be technological, not behavioral. As you point out the technologies are going to need to minimize the cost and inconvenience to human activity. The day it becomes economically irrational to not use renewable energy is the day that we beat climate change.
Yes, in response to strong social pressure. Look at how peoples reaction to tobacco has changed. We need the same feeling of disgust abput dirty diesal engines as a smoker at a kids birthday party.
> But it's not just a scientific question, it's (been made into) a question of how humans fundamentally live on the planet.
I agree with your first point but disagree with the above in quotes. Climate change fundamentally changes the way many global hegemonies do business and make money. That trickles into politics via lobbying and influences what people think because of who they vote for. That's why Elon Musk's (and maybe the tech industry as a whole) capitalist approach to climate change is the best hope we have.
> if you truly care about stopping climate change, you should be spending our effort developing solutions that do NOT require fundamental changes in how humans live on this planet
Yes!
If you make the most environmentally friendly alternative the cheapest, people will choose it, as if by magic.
If you make electric cars cheaper to own and operate than ICE cars, people will switch.
If you make solar power cheaper than coal, energy providers will switch.
If you make synthetic meat cheaper than real meat, there won't be any more factory farms and livestock slaughter.
If an at-home 3D printer can make your clothes and toys and stuff cheaper, you won't need to ship enormous amounts of containers with manufactured goods from China.
> We need to fundamentally change how humans live on this planet and interact with our ecosystems to move past issues like this.
I don't know about that. It seems like moving to mostly-electric transportation and replacing coal and natural gas power plants with wind and solar isn't a huge lifestyle change.
That's not to say that such a change can be done quickly, nor it will be easy. We still have some unsolved problems like energy storage. But it's not like we all need to become hunter-gatherers and live in cob huts. I think that by implying that people are going to have to give up driving or not heat their houses in the winter in order to address climate change, we just make it that much harder to gain political support from those same people.
>>We need to fundamentally change how humans live on this planet
Don't worry. As the climate changes, it will fundamentally change how humans live on this planet. Oh you wanted to choose how we change. Well, then, I share your pessimism.
I'm with you on that one. The current patterns of human consumption are too slow to change in the face of the type of climate change we are looking at. Even simple things like the obscene volume of packaging used for marketing and antitheft measures speak against real reform occurring soon.
I can't help but be reminded of the factoid that in 1898 international planning conferences were flummoxed on how on earth to deal with the ever-increasing problem of the amount of horse manure in cities... by 1912, not so much.
Now solar is cheap, coal seems incredibly unwieldy. Not just the poles and wires, but the mine, the railway to take the coal from the mine to the plant...
We are now a year or two past an inflection point -- building new coal plants at this time would seem like a much riskier investment. And that means the rate of construction is going to drop way below the rate of retirement pretty fast & pretty soon.
And because solar has high variability, it's going to get overbuilt (nobody wants their battery to go flat much, so it'll spend most of it's time full). ie, there is going to be a bunch of "spare power" lurking around that is effectively free.
And since a lot of problems can get turned into energy problems, that's a pretty happy place to be.
Rash prediction:
The Gold Coast currently has a mothballed desalination plant, and a water line from it to the South-East Queensland dams (built during the "Millenium drought"). I would not be surprised if within 30 years, it is running full-time, and pumping inland, even if the town-water dams are full -- because the marginal cost of running it instead of not-running it is zero, and with a bit more engineering the spill-over can be redirected to top up the Murray-Darling's flow. It'd require about 69kms of additional pipe, to connect Wivenhoe Dam to Cooby Dam. (Cooby Dam is in Toowoomba, which also has a bore into the Great Artesian Basin, so at that point you're inland enough to pump back into the basin. Draws from the basin have been blamed for the reduction in flows of springs that feed the Murray-Darling system...)
The quantities of water down a pipe might be small, in river terms, but if the marginal cost of power during periods of excess is zero, and seawater is free, then it might start to seem odd not just to leave it turned on whenever there's spare load...
I think we already changed significantly how we lived from a few decades back. Not because of climate change, but because of technology.
Renewable energy becomes competitive in many places worldwide since ~1-2 years, which will fuel investments and change the way we generate energy. Not because of climate change, but because of economics. Batteries are vastly more efficient than a decade back. It doesn't need a huge invention for batteries to be competitive with ICEs in cars, a few more years at current development speeds will likely be enough.
It was started with investments by people worried about climate change, but once it's economic it will be adapted by (nearly) everyone.
I think that we can beat climate change without needing to convince people that they have to fight it. Sell a decent electric pick up with ample range in the US and the extra power you get from an EV, in combination with home charging (finding gas stations on the country side can be annoying) could easily make it the best selling vehicle in the US. And I'm pretty sure it won't take too long for Ford to bring exactly that to market.
Technically I am an optimist. 50 Billion for fission plants and we are done. Socially, I am a pessimist----this is the perfect problem to defeat our institutions.
Problem with the startup crowd is they tend to get the former better than the latter.
Tokamak style fusion is efficient only at extreme scale. That's not five 10GW nuclear power plants, it's one terawatt scale plant. For reference, the entire Three Gorges Dam and its electrical plant cost ~$30bln and it has a nameplate capacity of 22.5GW. $50B seems low for a terawatt-scale fusion plant.
You'd need 3 of those plants to replace all electrical generation on earth, assuming they're at a 95% capacity factor. So call it a trillion dollars, maybe. Then you've got to look at total energy usage, which is order of magnitude larger, at 120TWh, so you'd need 12 to supply every energy need of current civilization. Maybe ~$50 trillion all included.
So one year of the entire world's productive output.
You'd need to account for the complete revamp of power distribution which would have to accompany any single source of so much power. Another couple billion (or more).
No, it's that they are expensive. Even in China reactors are only 30% cheaper than in the US, and in Korea only 25% less. In Europe they are around 10% more[1].
Note that at these prices it is cheaper to build solar, and in some cases (and places) solar AND pumped hydro power storage.
> Projects like these will certainly help a lot of people in the near-term
The priority is of course that it helps a company called YC make money, which should work. Keep in mind that this is the reason why companies are created and exist in the first place. It's called capitalism (and the reason for over-consumption, which lead us here). If it helps other people as well, then that is welcome, but not a priority.
You could also look at it a different way. If you assume that we can't beat it. Then what should we do to remedy the results of it? What solutions should be built
It feels kind of fruitless to continue this discussion with two sides that just don't agree even on what the discussion is about.
So my suggestion to those who believe there is no way back; start companies that build solutions to some of the consequences you fear.
One of possible and very effective, though quite radical solutions to stop climate change were discussed on another post's comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13302635
I actually have an uncle (on my wife's side) who is working on technology that can purify water via Ozone generation. (their website: http://www.ep-pure.com/, and an article about what they're doing: http://www.news-gazette.com/news/business/2014-03-23/company...) They can actually produce a small box (about the size of a lunchbox) that generates enough ozone to purify a well for at least one family that costs less than $100 and powers itself via solar panel. (it might have been around $50 or less, but I don't remember the specifics) Along with the obvious benefit of being cheap, the "cartridge" that actually generates the ozone is recyclable, tiny, and easily replaceable by anybody. This is important because the current standard way of generating ozone is through complex industrial machinery that is difficult to service, requiring large, expensive parts. (they have a comparison of a current piece of the machinery that generates the ozone vs their cartridges in the office I visited)
Note that while I'm related by marriage to one of the founders, I have no monetary stake in the company, so please don't take this as just a shill. I got to visit their (tiny) office where they're building the devices that generate the ozone, and it was just legitimately exciting to see what they were doing.
I may not be a founder of the company or anything, but I got a pretty good explanation and tour. So if anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.
Yes, it is. However, because of that it works as an incredible sanitizer. I was just talking with my uncle and he was saying it can turn the nasty water in third world countries clear and purified within a minute.
Normally toxicity like that would be a problem, but ozone is actually a highly unstable molecule. The reason it's toxic is because it is literally ripping other molecules apart to get components it wants to become completely safe oxygen. This property allows it to sanitize the water, and then leave the water completely drinkable and safe shortly after due to it completely transforming into something safe.
There have been solutions to this problem with urban farming practices with a combination of hydroponics and vermiponics for a number of years which can grow quite a bit of usable produce in a smaller land area using significantly less water.
Doing so would lend credence to which crop would be most effective for first improving upon. This report appears to suggest that alfalfa is one of the neediest crops grown in California in terms of water consumption. There are obvious other crops as well, in terms of land area (Corn being one of them) but nevertheless it's worth noting.
https://www.arb.ca.gov/fuels/lcfs/workgroups/lcfssustain/han...
Now, you might be asking, what is alfalfa for? Alfalfa is grown as a feed for animals, mainly dairy cows. Dairy cows eat roughly 70% of the alfalfa produced in the US. It's important to note that some alfalfa farmers tend to disagree that solutions like drip irrigation will work effectively enough - as it sometimes depends on the soil type and exposure to critters chewing up the pipes. (http://www.kpbs.org/news/2015/jul/03/how-one-california-alfa...)
In addition to this, we can also think about overall energy efficiency of consuming a product itself. For instance, potatoes yield more energy and protein than most crops grown.
Given the situation, if we want food we will have to pay the price in terms of water and land for producing the product used to produce that food.
Essentially, water is subsidized by the Californian water pricing rules in order to provide low-cost feed that boosts milk production in cows (this is why alfalfa in particular probably won't be pushed out). Californian dairy is a surprisingly powerful lobbying group with enough of a budget to also have a general public ad campaign to protect their interests.
The price subsidy encourages overconsumption, which causes the shortage.
Most places raise prices to fund desalination plants (if they have access to large bodies of water near the population centers, like California does), but that's why they don't. And given they won't do the obviously ideal strategy that works for everyone else in the world, it's been hard to get money from the struggling general budget to build the facilities. Why should every other department struggling for a budget to meet basic needs lose their chance because they won't adopt a simple price structure change?
Instead, non-renewable reserves are being depleted, as mentioned in the article.
The problem here isn't really technical in nature, though.
I don't think the current model of agricultural production in California is sustainable; for something that takes up 70-80% of the state's water, it only amounts to 2-2.5% of the GDP.
If the problem for California is one of policy, what endeavors can technology take on to help?
Develop tech to make alternate feed cheaper without dropping milk production or quality compared to alfalfa.
Improve water distribution in soil (I think there is a way to optimize this, varying by soil type and many other factors, that would minimize runoff). Or, get easier systems to recycle runoff. Ideally something with no/few moving or manufactured parts.
Reduce the cost of desalination plants and create a more realtime water market. Having one single water market would be a fundamentally technical task (albeit a complex one), but would level out prices, removing the incentive to make the policy mistakes.
Farmers are sunlight harvesters. Figuring out how to turn sunlight + carbon dioxide (renewables) into profitable products for sale can be achieved through good management in addition to appropriate technology.
Soil's water holding capacity can be increased through techniques like green mature and cover cropping. The permaculture approach to water is to slow it, spread it, and sink it.
I am in favor of synthetic meats and other protein sources like bugs. We just need to be mindful of the culture part of agriculture, where animal protein has been a large factor in many people's lives for a very long time.
There are also parts of the world where crop production doesn't make sense due to poor soil, erosion, water, climate, etc. Animal husbandry with good management practices is important and can help improve the functioning of these ecosystems. Now, whether we decide to eat these animals is another question.
as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, this is a problem we are working on ( http://www.mywildeye.com/wildeye/ ). At the moment there is a lot of waste of water ( and fertilizer ) when growing things.
I'm working on this problem right now. I believe the path to cheap water is through a massive fleet of solar stills floating in the South Pacific that passively collect evaporated water. Currently I'm working through my assumptions about biodegrading materials + construction, average loss (actuary) of such vessels in the region, logistics of collection/distribution over wide oceanic conditions, and how to build such a fleet incrementally without a massive amount of starting cash.
The big reason I saw this as an opportunity is the huge investments Saudi Arabia and the surrounding region are investing in their own water supply, and the knowledge that California's water politics will push them in the same direction. While traditional desalinization will help, the costs in material and electricity are prohibitive for small players.
To be honest I'm not sure. Transportation is one of the largest unknowns in this idea. On top of that, there's also the unknown of offloading the water at a given destination.
My hope is to work out a solution that takes less energy than traditional desalinization for the same amount of water, even with the transportation energy requirements.
Actually tankers are not cost-viable today (and probably never will be).
A friend of mine and I (both marine engineering professionals in commercial shipping) did a Cost Benefit Analysis on chartering a handy size tanker, cleaning the tanks and shipping water from Alaska to California during the droubt. I no longer have the email that broke the costs down, but cleaning costs aside, the operational costs alone yielded $0.25/gal. The cost of H20 in Ca is about $0.002/gal (cheaper for farmers).
If you're looking to start an H20 ptoduction venture, you need to account for demand factors that will inform the type of product that is needed. For example, if the demand is geographically fragmented and/or geopolitical isolated (e.g. to remote villages in relatively undeveloped or oppressive nations) then a small and very cheap personal H20 generation technology is probably more cost feasible than creating a supply infrastructure.
Just calculate the cost/galon at the end user then compare to today's cost and you'll have your answer.
I think tankers will still work, but the problem has to be attacked from a different angle.
California's water is a repayment on the bond measure for building it's infrastructure back in the 60s. It's somewhere around 80% of the price of water. This is the largest reason for it's seemingly fixed cost and relative cheapness, even during the drought years. Under these circumstances a single tanker is simply a drop in the proverbial bucket.
What California's drought hurts is the entire state's total water carrying capacity year over year. Once that reaches a critical low, California will be spurred to take another water bond project of equal size. I predict this will fund desalinization plants along the coast.
Looking at the problem from this perspective, I'm estimating how much water is produced daily by a given plant. The question then becomes "Can I produce as much water as this plant for less money (loan/maintenance/electricity)?" I imagine this requires a dozen such tankers each day in Los Angeles harbor, each selling at half the cost per gallon.
Now this might be impossible to engineer cost wise because of the very math you mentioned. It also requires a staggering amount of water production, which itself might be impossible. The logistics of managing such an enterprise might crush the venture under it's weight. I'm still working through these assumptions.
Still, you've helped greatly because now I know the current cost to maintain a tanker. It's expensive, but that's a number I can attack to drive down.
I was imprecise. As long as the tanker was filled greater than 95% of capacity with OJ concentrate, that's ok. Shippers aren't in the habit of leaving oil in the tank -- regulations only require rinsing/cleaning for residue in some situations.
It's buried in the CFR somewhere for the Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
I use, on average, about 3 litres of gasoline a day and about 250 litres of fresh water. This doesn't include the water used to grow the food I eat and it doesn't include the fuel to bring me my food.
But there is a difference of about two orders of magnitude.
Do it in the Antarctic, freeze it, then tow the iceberg.
This sounds totally stupid, but there has been previous work on the economics of towing icebergs to Australia for use as drinking water[1] as well as to Africa[2].
The numbers didn't work out then, but maybe now with higher efficiency solar power (and more advanced wind turbine design) the economics may have changed.
I'm expecting a non-trivial YoY turnover on the stills because of degradation and disaster, so those costs likely will still hold. I do read Aguanomics, but I haven't talked with David. Once I have more concrete numbers then I could have a productive talk with him.
Transporting the water is not an unknown. It's really really expensive since water is really really heavy. If transport costs were free or a solved problem we could pipe water from wet places (like BC/Washington/Great Lakes) to dry areas. Transport IS the problem. Some Valley hipster isn't going to solve this with an app or webpage.
Freshwater consumption absolutely dwarfs oil consumption. People also ask "if you can build long distance oil pipelines, can't you build long distance water pipelines?" It's not impossible, but it's not particularly affordable either because the value of water per liter is so much lower.
What about utilizing ocean currents? You deploy the collectors and eventually they end up somewhere close enough to be toed in without using much fuel. Deploy them at regular intervals and go pick them up as they get closer to shore. This is assuming such currents exist and will allow enough time for the collectors to collect enough water.
The big problem is I'll not be anywhere close to that level of production for a decade at least. Large scale is quite doable conceptually, but the financial requirements are nearly that of a desalinization plant itself. I need to work my way up to such production.
But to follow that line of thought, I've been investigating FPSOs [1] because of their transportation and "mobile factory" to service the individual stills while out in the "field".
Two reasons: low impact to water life and not very active commercial shipping.
Because the evaporation will create a larger percentage of salt, there is a concern that this would affect the local biology. This is double for any industrial accident that happens. However there is a large "Dead Zone" between South America and Australia [1] where both problems will be far away from any life.
The second is there is less commercial and personal ship traffic in that part of the world [2], lessening the possible collisions and other accidents because of wayward stills.
I believe California has alternative methods to desalinization like the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, or recycling water which reuses 60-82% of water that would otherwise be wasted.
Making clean water extremely abundant and cheap is also part of the problem. When it's cheap and abundant, instead of valuing it, we tend to waste and pollute it. In many places, we're not paying the true cost of clean water. In other places, some bioregions just can't support as many people as it does today without expensive technology and its unintended consequences. It's not technology that needs to change; it's our worldview about our relationship with water.
Exactly. Best way to deal with drought is to privatize the water supply and raise the price of water. Higher water prices leads to low value agricultural production moving elsewhere, minimizing water consumption.
The state could raise the price, but the issues with water, particularly in the developing world, require substantial amounts of investment in distribution, cleaning, etc. Likely will require additional investment from private sector.
Also, a political entity like the state is unlikely to arrive at an efficient price. Likely to still be underpriced due to political pressure.
There's a really good book by Fedrik Segerfeldt called "Water for Sale". I highly recommend checking it out. It goes over some possible public-private partnerships that could help expand water access and minimize excessive water usage.
Does this plan theorize that in places like sub-Saharan Africa (and other places where similar nonprofits are active [1]), the people living on the land will pay true market prices for water out of their meager, subsistence agriculture-based incomes, instead of sending a family member to the well?
I can speak for Uganda at least, since several of my contract farmers lead fairly low income lives. Can't really speak for the rest of sub-saharan Africa.
One of the biggest costs a peasant family currently has is the time it takes for the woman of the family to get to the well and back with water (in Uganda, it is always women doing this). She usually spends several hours each day doing so. Obviously, this situation is improved greatly if they're near the Nile or another river, but for those who are further afield they spend hours of potentially productive time fetching water.
An increase in the price of water could incentivize development of closer wells, better delivery methods, etc. by profit seeking companies, minimizing the time she spends going back and forth between the well and her house. She can spend that time working and generating income instead.
This will not improve household wealth in all cases, but I'm betting that something like this would help improve several of these families lots in life.
That sounds like some Garrett Hardin argument -- privatization will not solve the water shortage issue. It would simply allow large industrial farms, which typically pollute local water sources through fertilization runoff, to buy up the water supply under an auction based system. What the government needs to do is adopt policies that enforce water conservation and remove obsolete laws, such as one that promotes farms to use up the amount of water allotted to them to receive the same share next season.
Great timing :-) We've got a lot of experience with water I n the Netherlands (that little country that was partially build out of the ocean and that's several meters below sea level. Y-combinator should become a member of Water Alliance: "The Water Alliance focuses on innovative and sustainable water technology that can be used worldwide". Startups around water technology, a university and global businesses like Philips and more. See: http://wateralliance.nl/en/about-us/
For what it's worth, I remember seeing a shower system, a few years ago, out of Scandinavia that recycles water (5 liters used instead of the normal 150 liters). IIRC, it's the one in the video [1].
On a personal note, it really is amazing how little water one needs to shower with when using a bucket, as I once had to do while in Brazil.
Too bad you have to be in the bay area. My son and I have been working on a system that captures, stores, filters water and the whole thing is powered by solar. Already did a small working prototype and are now working on a bigger one. Can't be in the bay area though and we really need access to land/yard space which we have where we are at.
I'm guessing this is for personal use and not agricultural or industrial? How does the cost per gallon compare with desalination and wastewater recycling?
Hoping to eventually target agricultural but we are not near that stage. The current prototype we are working on is being developed more for personal home use and communal type gardens. We have 2 local communal gardens in town that we will be testing it out on after our backyard prototype is complete. Initially the captured/stored water will primarily be used for watering and cleaning. We would eventually like the water to be drinkable too but that's a ways off.
It is more than just a capture/store system though. It taps into multiple sensors to determine how much water to use for given situations in order to not waste the water it does capture.
Honestly, I don't know how the cost would compare with desalination and wastewater recycling. Isn't desalination really expensive?
Desalination is pretty pricey at ~$2000 per acre foot, but desalination and wastewater recycling are your likely competition. Assuming of course that you're only going to sell this in drought-stricken areas. If you're aiming for wetter areas, you're competing with rain water, and its tough to beat free.
Could you give a walkthrough of how this works? I'm trying to get a better grasp on your prototype
Only South Korea, Russia, and China appear to be able to build nuclear plants on a reasonable budget and timescale. And I'd put an asterisk next to project costs in Russia and China because they don't have great domestic transparency and the projects they offer to build abroad are pretty expensive.
In addition to high costs, nuclear power projects often face opposition from the public in developed democratic nations.
The region with highest current demand for desalination, Middle East/North Africa, is "blessed" with a lack of democracy. If the Saudi monarchy wants nuclear power they don't have to get voters on board -- no voting! But the costs are still high. And although Saudi Arabia would like to decrease its domestic fossil fuel consumption to free up more for exports, it doesn't want to accelerate a shift away from fossils elsewhere. IMO it's kind of a tightrope walk between advancing their own non-fossil energy sources, to grow/preserve export revenue, and avoiding a global shift away from fossils that could diminish their export revenue.
I've always thought it really cool how we can collapse the water problem into the energy problem. (And, to be clear, I agree with your solution to the energy problem.)
Nuclear is more costly than vast majority of other energy sources. Solar makes more sense if you want to stay green, and if you don't care about the green aspect traditional energy generation is probably better.
Ok, I'll bite. I'm the dumbing guy in the room, so I need some help understanding.
Given that water is 71% of the earth's surface[1], it seems like this is mostly a transportation problem.
We don't need to create water, unless that would make transport easer.
We don't need to filter water, unless that is easer to do then transporting it.
In the case of drought, the problem seems to be the transport of water, and near zero cost irrigation provided normally by rain.
Optimal water transportation seems to be the core problem to solve. With cost effective localized irrigation replacement for rain a subset related problem. (Perhaps if drought is more spacial than temporal, the irrigation solution could be temporary and mobil so as to move to areas of drought as needed).
So what ways can we think of to transport water? Or if that's not the core problem, then what is the right problem to solve?
Transportation is extremely expensive, and in every case I've researched more expensive than local production or recycling.
I'm one in a long line of people who have looked into the failed idea[1] of buying an old single hull oil tanker, gutting the insides, cleaning and refitting, and running it between Sitka and LA filled with water. Much cheaper to produce in LA. Current sale price in LA is very low - largely due to state subsidies and lack of an actual water market, but thats unlikely to change soon. If you can lower the energy cost of transport its still likely cheaper to produce locally, due to high energy cost of desalination and wastewater recycling.
Large plastic bladders are another possibility for transportation. Just let the current take the bags down the coast and fix a GPS to the bag. Lots of issues with other boats destroying the bladders though, along with running aground, etc. Likely still cheaper to produce locally.
Only economic way to transport water currently is in water dense crops like rice, tomatoes, corn, most fruits, etc.
Edit: To answer the question at the bottom of your post, the real problem is energy. If you lower the cost of energy production and storage, you've removed a huge chunk of water production costs. Focusing on water first is likely to lead nowhere.
Ok, too expensive seems like a reasonable argument, but how much too expensive, specifically? I mean if water is available but not clean how expensive can a purifier be before being at parody with cost of transporting the same amount of water?
What is the "cheaper to produce locally" method, and in what way is it not the solution?
Also, what about pipelines? Even if only useful in limited contexts (i.e. downhill, or open channels), or for very short distances.
That's a really good idea to transport water using large bladders. Perhaps you could even control movement as needed with small engine craft and nets. You'd need no where near the infrastructure of commercial shipping, yet bladders could be put in shipping containers as well.
Ok, too expensive seems like a reasonable argument, but how much to expensive, specifically?
See my other reply. In short, based on a CBA we did a few yrs back, fuel consumption alone using a diesel-powered handy size tanker to ship H20 from Alaska to Ca yields a shipping cost of ~$0.15/gal. Ca H20 costs <$0.002/gal. So, a factor of 75 more expensive.
Ok, thanks. So that particular solution is not cost effective for the CA market, but what about a different market? Or perhaps a different mechanism of transportation?
> but what about a different market? Or perhaps a different mechanism of transportation?
I'm not sure what you mean by 'a different market', but I can address the latter:
Generally, commercial shipping will yield the greatest economies of scale for bulk cargo transport of any mode of transport (except perhaps pipeline - I'm not sure). You could use a larger tanker ( https://www.google.com/amp/s/oilandgaslogistics.wordpress.co...), like a ULCC that has 4X the displacement (cargo carrying capacity) as the handy size tanker we assessed. However, that would perhaps yield a ~50% cost reduction - far short of the ~99% reduction needed. https://project-firefly.com/node/19396 - this depicts containersips, but the exponential decay scale/cost relationship is similar for tankers.
NP. This did get me thinking about the idea again. If, like you say, you could identify a market with a much higher cost/gal of water AND you find a way to significantly reduce chartering and operating costs, you might be able to turn a profit at scale.
Reducing Opex can be done by chartering a foreign flag vessel (i.e. much cheaper than US flag - although you won't be able to trade H20 between US ports due to the Jones Act (1).
Here's a crazy idea for reducing fuel costs (the biggest Opex). You could employ H2 fuel cells + motor propulsion on your ship vice diesel engines. You might think that H2 fuel would be hazardous/infeasible to carry, which is correct. However, you could possibly skirt that issue employing an aluminum H2 generation system that generates H2 fuel on demand directly from water (sea or cargo) (2). This process oxidizes the aluminum until it is depleted, however, to refuel you could offload the containerized depleted Al ashore and load fresh Al. On shore, the depleted Al can be reconditioned (de-oxydized) via a solar or wind powered reconditioning plant (basically melt the Al to liberate the O2).
Thus, while a solar-cells generally don't have the necessary energy density to power a ship at typical transit speeds, this is one way to build a very clean solar/wind (albeit indirectly) powered fleet. The Capex might be a little high, but it's doable.
Current methods of local production are desalination and wastewater recycling, both of which are heavily state subsidized, and in the case of wastewater recycling state owned. Very difficult to get into actual production of water. Most desalination companies actually just manage the desalination plants.
Pipelines have some potential, but in very limited cases. Could be useful in Caribbean though. Pipe water from Dominica to other Eastern Caribbean islands. I haven't run the numbers on that, but there might be some potential for an intrepid investor. Shallow water means its easy to lay and repair pipelines, every other island in the Caribbean being water deficient means demand. Might work.
About 2.5% of water on Earth is freshwater. More than 68% of that is frozen in icecaps and glaciers, and 30% is groundwater [1]. Easily accessible liquid freshwater (e.g. from lakes or rivers) is way less than a hundreth of a percent of all water on Earth, and even that's concentrated mostly around a few very large lakes: Lake Baikal alone is 20% of that, North America's Great Lakes are another 20%.
Historically, humans settled near freshwater, and built civilizations. On every continent, metropolitan civilizations built aqueducts to carry clean water in from further away. Temporary water shortages (e.g. drought) were mostly weathered in-place, long-term shortages were often dealt with by migration, potentially including warfare.
The core problem is that people should be living near easily accessible freshwater, and if they aren't, it's either due to a historical grievance, poor planning, or (natural or anthropogenic) climate change.
The 71% statistic is from all water sources. The difficulty is easily accessible freshwater sources, so cheap desalination seems to be critical.
"Freshwater makes up a very small fraction of all water on the planet. While nearly 70 percent of the world is covered by water, only 2.5 percent of it is fresh. The rest is saline and ocean-based. Even then, just 1 percent of our freshwater is easily accessible, with much of it trapped in glaciers and snowfields. In essence, only 0.007 percent of the planet's water is available to fuel and feed its 6.8 billion people."
It's not that simple, you can't give people water without a sewage and water waste management just look at what happened in Africa.
We had charities digging wells and what it did is make it worse for many many people.
They had running water and with it came toilets with no treatment.
Fecal mater and water don't mix in nature it decomposes in drainage ditches it becomes a hotspot for bacteria and parasites.
A lot of the feel good water projects in Africa didn't pan out that well for the local population, they often bring deseases and contaminate the local water supply, brake down and actually reduce the water security.
If we want to give people access to readily available water we have to give them a full solution including what to do with the waste water and how to safely treat and recycle it.
Interesting, I've seen criticism of well projects in Africa but more about having them run dry/break with no funds for maintenance. Do you have any sources I could read for disease/problems caused by working wells?
> So what way you can think of to transport water? Or if that's not the core problem, then what is the right problem to solve?
Water water everywhere, and not enough to drink.
Note that the majority of municipal water systems include purification steps, not just transportation; waiting for nature to purify water for you doesn't suffice. I don't think transportation alone suffices; on average you'd have to go further and spend more to obtain already-pure water. That 71% includes a lot of seawater, river water, lake water, swamp water, and many other sources you wouldn't want to drink directly.
That doesn't mean we have a shortage of water, and transportation infrastructure remains a critical shortfall in many areas, but the problem involves many facets, including transportation, purification, and sanitation.
Water is a very California problem at the second... Not every part of the USA is in drought, but CA sure has. Nearly all of CAs water goes to agriculture. It's a shame there's so much snobbery and false information around GMOs... Having crops that could be grown with less water would be a huge benefit to the world. Amazes me that people will take the scientific highroad to global warming, but a witchcraft based approach with GMOs. That's where I'd put my focus
The problem most people have with GMOs is not that they have been genetically modified per se, it's the pesticides and herbicides which are then flooded on those GMO crops. In fact, everyone I know who eats organic is not doing so to avoid the GMO component, but they are doing so to avoid the biocides.
And by the way, those biocides get into water supplies too.
Both methods are used. I recall (but am probably wrong out of date)
- Monsanto's "roundup ready" line of breeds is resistant to their pesticide, with the idea that nothing else will be.
- GMO crops on average (world-wide? nation-wide?) are sprayed with less pesticides, implying "roundup ready" as an anomaly.
The takeaway is GM is a tool. I'm 100% for it, but like most tools it can be used for good or ill. Let's be careful, without implying the risks here are anything special compared to other powerful technology.
Assuming you mean herbicides as well as pesticides the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no. The classic example of a GMO crop is "Roundup Ready" corn, developed by Monsanto. It makes the plant resistant to glyphosate, so the crop can be sprayed, killing weeds &etc. without killing the corn.
I guess as a lay person, I meant both. Makes sense, so does that effectively reduce the volume of pesticides/herbicides, or does it just allow you to lay it on with less precision?
In the case of roundup ready crops, it sounds like it's both more effective as an herbicide and less toxic. The Wikipedia page didn't say whether that was toxicity towards humans. So in that sense roundup ready crops seem to be net better for the consumer anyway.
Jury seems to be still out on whether roundup is actually harmful, leaning on the no side at least according to the Wikipedia article on Glyphosate.
For many crops the GMO component is designed to resist biocides.
If you're interested in the topic, I'd encourage you to read about the most common GMO crops encountered by consumers, the primary biocides used on those crops, and then read in vivo studies on those biocides.
Do your own research and be discerning about the sources and data, there is an immense amount of astroturfing on the subject matter.
Some are designed to reduce the need for pesticides, but many are made by the pesticide companies to be more tolerant to the sprayings. This results in less insect/fungal damage and weeding (though the weeds seem to be able to keep up even without the GMO help).
Water is a very California problem at the second... Not every part of the USA is in drought
Water is a problem in many places. I do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies and have worked on a bunch of water well projects (and have in fact been working on a water project today). They're much more interesting and technically sophisticated than you might imagine, and water tables have been dropping in much of the country. Wells are also easily fouled. Fracking has been a problem for water wells in many parts of the country.
Right now, wells cost a lot of money to drill—often more than $10K—and are easy to screw up. That may be part of the reason YC is looking for water-related startups.
Besides California, and staying in the US, water is also an issue everywhere in the Southwest (Colorado River basin, a quarter-million square miles), and throughout the agricultural midwest, from Nebraska to Texas, where water is being over-drafted from shallow portions of the continent-scale Ogallala Aquifer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer#Aquifer_water...).
Too much water can also be just as devastating as too little water. As our climate warms, more energy will be stored in atmospheric and oceanic waters, creating more powerful hurricanes and storms. On top of that, sea level rise will cause storm surges to be more destructive and costal erosion will gradually sink major costal cities. Climate change is water change.
> Amazes me that people will take the scientific highroad to global warming, but a witchcraft based approach with GMOs.
Doesn't seem that amazing when you consider that in both cases people are trying to protect themselves against a perceived threat - the science has little to do with it, other than as a tool.
Also, to be fair, most of food science is hardly worthy of the name. We can barely tell what makes a healthy diet in general. How can any scientist worthy of the name say that all GMO's are safe for long term, regular human consumption when they can't even say that about non-GMOs? (see disagreements about whether something as simple as refined sugar or meat should be a regular part of a healthy diet)
Are water-thrifty GMO variants of those crops commercially available? Have they been rejected in California due to GMO-fear? The answer to both needs to be "yes" to blame GMO fearmongering for California's water problems. (I don't disagree that fear of GMOs is overblown, but original comment gave no evidence it's causing the CA water problems.)
There are much simpler solutions than GMO. Besides most water (not sure of exact figure, would have to look it up again) used in industrial agriculture runs off the land. GMOs won't change that.
Is GMO fear unfounded? We're talking about grafting in genes from other species. We don't know how that might affect safety. We, in the USA, don't require testing for safety. How do we know that such changes is not like biological asbestos? It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now we know that it's terrible.
Imagine doing that to your food population all the while enforcing draconian IP laws on farms not using such products, but caught up in the wind.
Mutation Breeding[1] has been in use since the 1930s and has exactly the same risks in terms of creating unexpected attributes (allergens or whatever) in plants. GMO is little more than a vastly more efficient kind of Mutation Breeding; this is not a new risk.
Kinda. This is qualitatively different because we are purposely injecting into a plant a poison that is from another source. Can we eat that poison? All I'd like to see with GMO is a label so I can make an informed decision to purchase. In the US, such labeling is fought.
Excellent! Obviously this is just itself a speadup of older means artificial selection, but by employing the nuclear boogeyman is a better counter argument.
What is being done to use the brine produced by desalination?
Whenever I look into this, it seems that all the brine questions revolve around how to dispose of it in a safe manner, or how to re-introduce it gradually to the sea.
Why can't we turn brine into table salt, or use it in some industrial process?
Sea water is about 3.5% salt by weight [1]. The city of Los Angeles uses about 14 billion gallons of water in a month [2]. This works out to something like 2 million tons of salt being produced just by LA in a single month. So we can turn it into table salt... but it's something like six tons of table salt per year per person.
Even better, you can build an osmosis power station and create a lot of electricity. The energy in the salinity difference between the water of a river and the water of the ocean is enormous.
(It basically works like this: You have two containers with water of different salinities, connected with a membrane that only lets the water pass, but not the salt. The water will move through the membrane to balance the salinity - osmosis - and one container will have a rising water level, which can be used to generate electricity with turbines.)
Depends. You only need a difference in salinity, not non-salty water. If the brine is much more saline than the ocean, there's your energy potential. On the other hand, this kind of power plant also goes well at the mouth of a river. You don't need clean water at all.
I don't know about California, is all the fresh water fully recycled until the rivers are dry? That would be hard to imagine.
I always thought we might be able to reuse empty strip mines and dump the salt in there but someone smarter than me can chime in on why that may not be environmentally sound.
How about moving around some ice bergs to areas in need of fresh water?
Dassault was working on "Project Ice Dream" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL5blnAH9xw - which centered on tugboats to move ice bergs around... sails would probably work too.
This also doubles as large-scale cargo transportation between continents, for cargo that can tolerate a 6 month journey. An awful lot of cargo can fit on an ice berg with a surface area of many hundreds of square kilometers.....
Tugboats aren't the only option--- you could use on-shore rope wrangling and pulling, you could use sails, you could use focused orbital mirrors to melt ice on one side as a propulsive force... and so on.
This idea of pushing, pulling icebergs was investigated by ppl much smarter than me (Glaciology/Maths dept. Uni Melb) to see if it was at least feasible. The idea has some merit, the physics (moments of inertia) get in the way. Make for an interesting experiment to prove how.
I don't know if this is useful, but if you're looking to acquire more background knowledge from someone with 'expertise' on water scarcity, perhaps you might consider contacting the Singaporean government?
Water scarcity became a major policy issue for them around the time they were kicked out of the Malaysian Federation in the 60s, probably because their main water supply is located in Malaysia... They currently have the capacity to satisfy 30% of their water demand using 'reclaimed water' (i.e. recycled) and 10% using desalinated. Although I don't think they actually need to fully utilise these capacities as 50-75 per cent of their water needs are met by man-made rainfall catchments [0].
I realise how strange it is to say 'just go have a chat with the Singaporean government', but I suspect they'd be happy share their expertise. My sketchy understanding is that Singapore has found that 'reclaimed' (i.e. recycled) water is far more cost-effective (and cleaner) compared to desalinated water.
And despite being a semi-benevolent autocracy, the Singaporean government has had to work pretty hard to convince their population that there's nothing wrong with drinking recycled water (i.e. water that previously had poop in it). Learning how they overcame this issue could be valuable...
Build out massive solar and wind power capacity and create electricity for the grid. Use specially designed desalination plants which operate well at low utilization and significant swings in production to smooth out the peaks in the solar / wind production curves. Excess power is converted into clean water. Water seems like a reasonably good place to "store" the value of the energy you just created. Furthermore, what is the value of having a somewhat more predictable power supply from solar and wind resources?
What is the current state-of-the-art for portable, personal water purification methods and devices, like the sort you could use to treat a bottle's worth of water?
Devices like the LifeStraw [1], the LifeSaver bottle [2], the WaterIsLife straw [3], and the SteriPEN [4], are nice, but they're pricey. Any ways of reducing the cost?
Aren't companies like Hampton Creek, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods indirectly working on this? I'd love to see other types of innovation but it seems to me that the lowest hanging fruit is to decrease the demand for animal based foods.
we are doing a bunch of tech around better water usage on farms. http://www.mywildeye.com/wildeye/ We have done a bunch of work in New Zealand and Australia and now moving into California and the rest of the US.
One of the big things is not just to optimize water, but optimize the whole problem which water is one part of.
I'm excited about this quite a bit, but does YC have any experts on water & science/engineering in general? "lower-cost desalination plants, novel purification technologies" are technical science & engineering problems often closely tied to academia & research. Fortunately though there are some great resources in the Bay Area in these fields.
I've thought a lot about this and the key is not just technology, but the ability to quickly automate the markets for the sale of water. In many cases, water is plentiful, it's just very hard to get it somewhere. Infrastructure combined with a way to automate water rights exchanges is a really important part of this equation.
Isn't the obvious solution here cheap/clean electricity = cheap/clean purified water? Seems higher leverage to focus on the energy part of the equation.
If politicians were working for the common good and not just for the big transnational companies we will not have this problem. What about fixing that?
All applications are open on a rolling basis; the October 4 deadline is for the Winter 2017 batch. Applications for W17 after that time are still considered for late entry into the batch, but once things are well underway applications will switch to S17.
It also reads as if you will be moving to the Bay Area now - did they already make choices or was there a typo? The article is from today, but the rest of the details make me think otherwise. It's pretty confusing..
Another thing to think about - why move to the Bay Area? Water is not a software problem; water is an infrastructure, political, energy intensive (we're talking drinking water, right?), and most importantly cost prohibitive problem.
What does moving to the Bay Area get you in this arrangement - besides access to YC people?
If you are doing scientific R&D, the bay area has access to analytical facilities at Stanford, Berkeley and a few DOE labs. It's not the worst place in this regard. I'm sure you could manage in plenty of other places also, say Boston, for example.
Source: I work at a startup in the bay area doing materials science research.
If the climate becomes unreliable you need large scale underground water storage of rain to compensate this.
Basically you need cheap, replaceable solar-pumps (that one is allready doable).
And you need cheap, near surface volumes dug out and sealed.
Actually all you need for that is - a water pump and a glorified fridge. You drill a initial hole- and now you pump water in and freeze it. Water expands, you thaw it and repeat. Basically a giant intentional pothole.
Now, anyone here into tunnel engineering? How to cheaply seal the resulting artificial cavern?
Is YC spreading this announcement anywhere else? Seems like Engineers Without Borders might be a good audience (which is mostly civil/environmental/mechanical engineers IME).
I thought the whole point of YCombinator was to find startups run by people who are willing to listen to the market, "pivoting" to what might be a different problem in a different market.
> We’re optimistic we will beat climate change. But, at the same time, we need to prepare for things to get worse.
No, we need to act urgently to stop climate change; saying only "We're optimistic" sends the message that it's not a critical problem that needs urgent attention.
