alt Hacker NewsIt takes too much energy and produces water too slowly to scale. In general any area with sufficient moisture in the air to explore this also has easier access to rain and ground water.
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LogicFailsMe • yesterday at 7:17 PM
Great point, in my case in the PNW, the water from my local well is infested with manganese (as in clogging the household plumbing in the absence of a sediment filter) and other contaminants and the water company providing it is owned by private equity. Legally, I can drill my own well for non-potable irrigation, but god forbid I filter and/or chlorinate it for my own household use. So I end up considering options like this, thanks for debunking.
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A lot of energy is only a problem if that energy is very expensive.
The good news in a desert: plenty of sunshine. So you can generate a lot of electricity with some cheap solar panels, there is plenty of space to put some down, and there aren't a lot of NIMBYs around to complicate the permitting process for that.
Some desert ecosystems actually depend on condensation with specialized plants and animals harvesting humidity from ocean breeze. Large parts of e.g. the Sahara border on the Atlantic ocean. Lots of water in the air but not a lot of rain. And even if humidity is low, there still is some water in the air usually.
But the simple fact of course is that there is a lot more water in water than there is in air. If you want to extract meaningful amounts of water from air, you need to process a lot of it.