
167Mitigations of Human Impacts through Technology
pond at Beit Ha’aravah has 250,000 m
2
area and powers a 5 MW turbine. Such
ponds are often operated at high power at night and allowed to “rest” and
“charge” in the sunlight (Faiman 2012).
The largest solar pond in the United States is in El Paso, TX. This 0.3 ha
pond runs a 70 kW Rankine-cycle turbogenerator that runs a 20,000 L/day
desalinating plant and supplies process heat to an adjacent food processing
company (Bedi and Falk 2000). Strangely, there are no convection currents in
a solar pond because both the salinity and water temperature increase with
depth. The brine temperature can reac ...