> but is it power in = water out, plus a bunch of facility maintenance and operations? Basically yes. I'm mostly familiar with Reverse Osmosis, where electric

> but is it power in = water out, plus a bunch of facility maintenance and operations? Basically yes. I'm mostly familiar with Reverse Osmosis, where electricity to drive the pumps is about 40% of the TCO. There's another big chunk for consumables - chemicals, failed membranes, etc. Then the rest is capital costs to build the thing. It's not "free power == free water", but the power is a significant factor. > Desalination will be the new pumped hydro. Eh, no. Desal is a great place to dump surplus energy, but you can't get the energy back out. It pairs well with nuclear power, so you can use extra nighttime capacity. It's less useful with solar, unless you've severely overbuilt panels and can't find anything else to do with them on sunny days. It's a better tradeoff to buy fewer panels and use that money to pay for storage (pumped hydro, batteries, whatever).