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Good point.

In fact, since the end product (desalinated water) is easy to store in great amounts, desalination could be one of the processes that would run when surplus energy is available.

With current prices for renewable generation and storage, an overcapacity in production of 300-500% seems to be the optimal from a system cost perspective: In such a world, lots of surplus energy would be available at low cost for a flexible consumer such as this.

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> In such a world, lots of surplus energy would be available at low cost for a flexible consumer such as this.

That totally happens already. When you look at a windy, sunny day in Germany in the summer, you'll find that renewables are producing so much energy that prices drop into the negative and somebody is being paid to burn it.

I think we'll see this more often with more renewables and it might be a chance to have, not yet highly optimized, processes running that need a lot of energy. Desalination is one of those, so is production of hydrogen.

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