An interesting article about desalination technology. One thing I think it gets wrong is it underestimates the ability to use renewables as the power source. Why? I’ll explain. nytimes.com/2019/10/22/cli…
Photovoltaic and wind capacity will need to be substantially in excess of daily needs because the systems need to be sized for peak load on the worst generation days. That means there's going to be a lot of surplus power out there on good generation/low use days.
Storage will of course be used to time shift generated power to times when it is needed (like night and subsequent days), but there will inevitably be more power produced than can be stored immediately in batteries and the like. That's where desalination comes in.
Desalination, aluminum production, and other energy intensive industries can be used as a form of storage. The article noted that renewable power isn't available 24 hours a day, but then failed to realize that one needn't run plants 24 hours a day.
Fresh water can be stored, and stored extremely cheaply. You can choose when to run desalination plants. So you can run them when power is nearly free because there's no other immediate use for it, and cheaply store the water in large reservoirs for when power is expensive.
One can run a variety of energy intensive industries this way. Yes, it will mean a shift in the way people do business, but the changes needed are technologically easy compared to the problem of deploying sufficient renewables.
One result of this is that I suspect the answer to water shortages worldwide is the same as the answer to how to generate non-polluting power. People just haven't been thinking about it in those terms because they haven't considered that renewables mean large power surpluses.
