Energy consumption is an important aspect in our day to day life. Energy consumption rate is increasing very rapidly everyday. If this continues as such then the world will one day face shortage of energy. So its time to look for more sources of energy rather than the non-renewable sources of energy and reduce the rate of consumption of non-renewable energy. There are many forms of renewable energy sources in the world. The abundant renewable energies include solar energy, tidal energy, wind energy, Geo thermal energy etc. One of the most recent power generation techniques is osmotic power generation.

Osmotic power or salinity gradient power is the energy available from the difference in the salt concentration between seawater and river water. Salinity gradient power is a specific renewable energy alternative that creates renewable and sustainable power by using naturally occurring processes.

Principle

The basic principle involved in osmotic power generation is OSMOSIS. Osmosis is the movement of solvent molecules through a selectively permeable membrane into a region of higher solute concentration, aiming to equalize the solute concentrations on the two sides. It may also be used to describe a physical process in which any solvent moves, without input of energy, across a semi permeable membrane (permeable to the solvent, but not the solute) separating two solutions of different concentrations.

Salinity gradient energy is based on using the resources of “osmotic pressure difference between fresh water and sea water.”All energy that is proposed to use salinity gradient technology relies on the evaporation to separate water from salt. Osmotic pressure is the "chemical potential of concentrated and dilute solutions of salt". When looking at relations between high osmotic pressure and low, solutions with higher concentrations of salt have higher pressure.