Sustainability
Triton plants operate with less energy than any other desalination plant on the market.
DESALINATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT.
Is desalination good for the environment? It can be—if you do it right. Developing any water supply infrastructure has an impact on the environment.
With desalination, the two main concerns are energy consumption and brine discharge
ENERGY CONSUMPTION
Desalinating water requires energy. Triton plants operate with less energy than any other desalination plant on the market.
While traditional desalination plants use 15 kilowatt hours (kWh) per cubic meter (264 gallons) of water produced, Triton has reduced the energy consumption of our plants to less than 3 kWh per cubic meter. That’s an 80% reduction. A Triton plant can produce a cubic meter of fresh water with the same amount of energy it takes to light a 100w light bulb for just 30 hrs.
How? Our plants use reverse osmosis (RO) technology, which uses 1/3 to 1/5 the energy that thermal desalination plants use. We’re constantly making technological advances that lower our plants’ energy consumption. For example, the addition of the pressure exchanger (1999) lowered consumption by 66%. And the iSave (added in 2008) lowered energy use by another 20%.
BRINE DISCHARGE
At Triton, we take care to minimize any impact on the environment.
First, the water that our plants discharge contains much less salt than the brine discharge of typical desalinators. That’s because we desalinate only about 33% of the water that passes through the membranes in our plants—as opposed to 50 – 70% in traditional plants—leaving the remaining 66% far less salty.
Second, our compact plants are a fraction of the size of traditional industrial desalination plants. And because our plants are installed at the sites where they’re needed, they’re spread out among much larger areas. As a result, they release much less brine over a much larger area. For example, the maximum daily brine discharge of a Triton plant is 3000 cubic meters—as opposed to 40,000 (or more) in an industrial facility.
We’re also investigating ways to use renewable energy to power our plants, which would greatly
decrease their carbon footprint.
