"We do not need to live with insufficient water – this is a temporary condition that is curable, just like a treatable disease. Using clean energy to produce clean water is like a vaccine, preventing and even reversing the spread of water scarcity."
This article completely ignores the key problem:
distribution (transportation).
Your source material is the ocean. Your consumers are well inland. In California, for example, you'd have to build a complete Eastbound set of pipelines and distribution mechanisms... and do it across the coastal mountains. Or, transport by roads, resulting in both added pollution and fatal damage to your cost model.
Now, there would be localized useful cases, such as farms in the Watsonville corridor and coastal municipal water districts, but there is no economy of scale.
The most direct application would be a pipeline leading from the desalination plant to the nearest point that you could feed water into a major aquifer, replenishing it.
Solar desalination is a form of "distributed generation" - it bypasses the need for large scale transportation by generating (reusing) water locally. The source water can be the ocean if that is the local resource. Inland, the source water is irrigation drainage (water leftover after irrigation). In other locations the source water is brackish groundwater, wastewater, process water or any other local impaired water source that can be converted to freshwater using solar energy. In essence, desalination is a form of reuse - every user of water can be a re-user.
A good analog for this is rooftop solar, another form of distributed generation. Transporting electricity is bypassed by generating solar energy locally (i.e. at your home). Scale is achieved by having thousands of small generators instead of a small number of large power producers that distribute electricity over long distances.
Net metering takes this concept further by leveraging the existing grid to enhance distributed resources. Excess solar energy is distributed back to the grid - users become providers. The same is true for water - large water users (like farmers) who are connected to the water grid can reuse and generate excess water that is redistributed through the existing water grid.
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Now, there would be localized useful cases, such as farms in the Watsonville corridor and coastal municipal water districts, but there is no economy of scale.
The most direct application would be a pipeline leading from the desalination plant to the nearest point that you could feed water into a major aquifer, replenishing it.
A good analog for this is rooftop solar, another form of distributed generation. Transporting electricity is bypassed by generating solar energy locally (i.e. at your home). Scale is achieved by having thousands of small generators instead of a small number of large power producers that distribute electricity over long distances.
Net metering takes this concept further by leveraging the existing grid to enhance distributed resources. Excess solar energy is distributed back to the grid - users become providers. The same is true for water - large water users (like farmers) who are connected to the water grid can reuse and generate excess water that is redistributed through the existing water grid.