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Desalination plants are capital intensive, and no one who builds them wants to run them only occasionally. They want to run them nearly all the time. Thus, nuclear, hydro, and geothermal are the best suited zero-carbon energy sources to work for it. Wave and tidal energy has not been deployed at any meaningful scale, but once they're in full production at scale then sure they could be used too.

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yes, but nuclear plants are also really capital intensive. Also, according to https://www.advisian.com/en/global-perspectives/the-cost-of-..., the thermal and electrical energy costs of desalination are greater than amortized capital cost. Running primarily off of renewables will probably reduce the uptime to 70% or so, but will dramatically reduce cost to run.

70% would be fine because you don't need to run desalination all the time. We can store water in watertowers and draw down when we need it

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