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Who doesn’t like clever thinking?  There are a bunch of ideas which, upon retrospective analysis, you kick yourself for not having thought of first.  Recently an osmosis based power generator has been commissioned in Norway by the utility company Statkraft.  Osmosis based power generation is essentially to flip the process of desalination via reverse osmosis (RO) membrane filtration.

In RO membrane desalination, salt water is pushed through a membrane which prevents the passage of salt.  On one side of the membrane you have clarified water and the other brinier water.  The system does not prefer this non-equilibrium state and accordingly the clear water and salt water want to mix back together (this is what is known as a difference in chemical potential on the two sides of the membrane and gives rise to what engineers call osmostic pressure).  Because water can flow back through the membrane to remix with the salt solution, energy in the form of pressure must be input to the system to prevent water from flowing back.

In osmotic energy generation, clean water is brought in through the membrane to the salty side.  Water easily flows through the membrane to mix with the salty side and generate work.  Simple right?  Clean, no emissions, and abundant salt water and …

Oh wait… clean, clarified, fresh water is already a challenge to obtain for billions on this earth.  You can’t get it everywhere.  And if sea level rise, low lying fresh water will become brackish.

The point is that you can’t get something for nothing.  This is the lesson that we took from grad schoool in Jeff Tester’s Introduction to Thermodynamics 10.40 class at MIT.  In real-world application, there is no such thing as a reversible process.  In RO desalination, we fight entropy using work.  In osmotic power generation we leverage entropy to create work.  It sounds like a perfect strategy if you can create one site to do both the forward and reverse operations (generate energy or clean water when one or the other is required) But between those two steps, we’ll always lose to real-world losses.

I’m really excited for two potential collaborations that are brewing up now.  One involves potentially working with a professor at MIT (my little sister) and a professor at Stanford (buddy from Stanford).  This is the sort of thing I dreamed about when I was in college - working with friends and family.  As we all started working/going to graduate school/doing research and saw our fields start to intertwine, the possibility began to solidify.  So we’re giving it a shot and we’ll see if this project can come together.  The project should involve energy distribution.  More on that later.

The other collaboration is coming together with a couple buddies from graduate school.  We’re putting some tools together to address some health related problems and I think this could have a strong potential impact in improving the distribution of information and health care.

At 26.2 Ventures we believe that the market in developing nations is a large one. The market sits at the cross-section of altruism, technology, and free-market economics. The last point is cloudy for some as most ‘relief’ or ‘aid’ products aimed at developing nations are viewed as subsidized by governments or NGOs. I see it differently.

Designing, creating, and marketing products for a developing nation market necessitates a low-cost objective because, flat out, the national economies have not grown sufficiently enough to leverage scale enjoyed by developed countries. Thus product development, technological advances, and distribution have to be accomplished with this “low-cost” dogma in mind. But does this stray far away from the doctrine of Fortune 500 global manufacturers? Indeed selling world-class CT scanners and selling Lifestraws should not have very different goals: costs should be driven down so profits can be maximized and reinvested in the companies, resulting in continued improvements that should enhance the well being of all people. Indeed paucity encourages elegance. Who wouldn’t want the best solution per buck after all?

On a side note: the Lifestraw addresses one of the fundamental problems of water: distribution. The large infrastructure required to purify water, typically available only to major municipalities, has been miniaturized to the size of underwater hockey stick, enabling efficient distribution of clean water at the point of consumption. Awesome!