Hacker News Reader

But mainland desalination plants are connected to the electricity grid.

The problem with only running them part of the time is that the fixed capital and other operational costs of the plant are now split over a smaller amount of water produced so that water is more expensive than if you ran the plant all the time paying more for electricity at other times of the day.

View on HN

There is certainly a trade off there, does the cheaper electricity compensate for the fact that you need to add say 20% extra capacity and the accompanying costs to your desalination plants as they will now be idle during low renewable production/times of high electricity costs.

If it's solar powered, more like 60% extra capacity to compensate for that annoying daily power down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com