The article is comparing to using atmospheric pressure distillation, which isn't used for commercial scale desalination... reverse osmosis is primarily. (Where

The article is comparing to using atmospheric pressure distillation, which isn't used for commercial scale desalination... reverse osmosis is primarily. (Where waste heat is available for 'free' flash distillation , which is already a lot more efficient than atmospheric pressure distillation, can be attractive... but if heat isn't available for free, RO uses about 80% less energy than multi-stage flash) So it sound to me like it may well be in an apples to apples comparison the method discussed in the article may be similar to or less energy efficient than RO. But maybe it could be used to enhance the usefulness of flash distillation for lower levels of waste heat.