“Acciona”, saulty water and Expo Zaragoza 2008

Acciona is a multinational working, among others, in the field of water

desalination. They are also official partners of Expo Zaragoza 2008 (in fact they will exhibit in a huge 1000 m2 pavilion) and they use this fact for their ads in newspapers.

Specifically Acciona will sponsor with 8 million euros (partially deductible). Acciona itself has been granted several projects within the Expo, including pavilions and other major infrastructures.

Coming back to the ads of Acciona, above you can see -next to the Expo Zaragoza logo- an example of their vision of a better tomorrow. They say: this year, we will build in California the biggest desalination plant in the USA, with a capacity of 204.000 cubic metres per day. Wouwww! This is a lot of water for thirsty people…. looking in the info of a previous post we could debate if they drink too much: Zaragoza consumes 100 litres per inhanbitant per day…Los Angeles 400 Litres…. Rwanda has an average water consumption of 10 litres per person per day...

What the advertisement doesn’t say is that to take the salt out of the water you need a lot (but a lot) of electricity, ie. a lot of potential CO2 emissions…and it could, because Acciona is also working on renewables....

In Spain a plan (called Agua) was presented to build plants to produce 600 millon of cubic metres of water per year. This is a lot of CO2 emissions if fossil energy is used to fuel them

If Spain is to comply with Kyoto targets, will need to plug all this new plants to non-fossil sources such as solar, wind, etc. We will see...probably a fantastic debate (sponsored by Acciona ;) to take place at the Expo Acciona pavilion next year.