Energy is getting cheaper very rapidly. I think there's room for an order of magnitude drop in prices per kwh on a relatively short timeline of maybe 1 or 2 dec

Energy is getting cheaper very rapidly. I think there's room for an order of magnitude drop in prices per kwh on a relatively short timeline of maybe 1 or 2 decades. Basically to well below 1 cent per kwh. Maybe two eventually: ~0.01-0.1 cent per kwh. That won't happen overnight of course but there are multiple paths to potentially very substantial cost reductions still. At those price levels, energy is close to free and we'll indeed be able to address a lot of things with it. It's not just water. Most of the big issues we have on this planet have an energy component to them either directly or indirectly. Energy is a bottleneck. Making energy very cheap enables a lot of positive changes. Take agriculture (and by extension, world hunger) for example. Agriculture requires water, light, warmth, and fertilizers. We can make clean water with desalination. We make fertilizers via energy intensive processes to produce ammonia (usually by first creating hydrogen). Light and heat we can create in green houses with yet more energy. With enough energy, you can grow bananas in Iceland and go skiing in Dubai. Neither of those things is science fiction btw. They really grow bananas in Iceland using geothermal energy and there is an indoor skiing hall in Dubai. There's also synthetic fuel production, transport, heavy industry, etc. All bottle-necked on energy. With synthetic fuels, there's a cross over point where that gets cheaper than drilling up oil and shipping it half way around the globe to refine it into fuel (all of these things take a lot of energy). It's not that far off.