I can’t answer that. But I do know how to kill three or four birds with one stone.
Build a large solar array and use it to convert sea water, via electrolysis to hydrogen and oxygen. Use the hydrogen in fuel cells, at night, to power the grid to charge EVs and collect the water which the fuel cell generates to grow food. The oxygen is a happy byproduct that could be sold to industry, medical use, etc.
Mike
For the engineers here do we have a good enough anode for that? It will need a film on the anode to stop a quick decay.
Sea water facing electroysis does not want to break into hydrogen and oxygen, instead it does hydrogen and, oops, chlorine. Just a little extra problem.
david fb
This research is about 5 years old
Mike
In the electrolysis of salt water, such as seawater, the ultimate goal is to produce hydrogen at the cathode,’ explains PhD student Jan Vos from the Leiden Institute of Chemistry. ‘The product formed at the anode is ideally oxygen, because that is harmless to the environment.’ However, during salt water electrolysis toxic chlorine gas can also form at the anode. The researchers have now produced a catalyst that minimizes the formation of chlorine gas in favour of oxygen formation. Vos explains: 'The catalyst consists of two metal oxides: iridium oxide with a layer of manganese oxide of only a dozen nanometers thick. Iridium is a material that exhibits high catalytic activity for the formation of both oxygen gas and chlorine gas; the manganese oxide acts as a kind of membrane that prevents the supply of chloride ions and suppresses the formation of chlorine gas. ’
Yep it is only been in the last five years or so that films were introduced to anodes to allow all of that to happen.
But the film might not stand up to the quantity of usage you want.
Won’t really know till someone tries it
Mike
Separately for this specific case it has been tried in steel and perhaps other smaller things. I do not know the outcomes.
Scalable technologies for removing salt from water have improved steadily over the past few decades. This is especially true for treating brackish groundwater, which is less salty than seawater. But desalination still can have major environmental impacts…In May 2022, the California Coastal Commission unanimously rejected a proposed $1.4 billion ocean desalination plant in Huntington Beach, partly because of its potential effect on sea life.
Cost is another major hurdle… Cost breakthroughs on major, market-ready technology in the near to medium term are unlikely. And desalination costs may increase in response to rising energy prices, which represent up to half the cost of removing salt from water.
Moreover, capital cost projections for desalination plants often greatly understate these facilities’ true cost. For example, the final cost ($1 billion) to build the ocean desalination plant in Carlsbad, California, which opened in late 2015, was four times higher than the original projection.
DB2
As the Dutch are the leaders in reclaiming land from the sea the Israelis are the leaders in desalination of sea water.