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Yeah, no. It won't be cheaper than tap water. The amount of energy required for desalination, clogging or no, is an additional cost on top of what you need to do to get water drinkable with non salinated water. So no matter the energy source, this cost has to be factored in and that will automatically make it more expensive. No free lunches in physics.
You are ignoring that saltwater is available in many, many more places than freshwater. Building a local efficient desalination plant can absolutely be more cost-efficient than transporting freshwater for hundreds of kilometres. Don't simplify so much you lose all perspective.
I am not ignoring that, it is also vastly more contaminated than fresh water with microplastics and all the other grabage shipping companies and countries have been dumping into it for the better part of a century now.
I'm not saying it is impossible to do or not a potentially sensible option in certain places, I am saying it is not going to be cheaper than tap water anywhere.
This system uses a variant of distillation to desalination the water. This means that a good part of the filtration and purification process required to make most fresh water potable would no longer be necessary, so it could be cheaper than regular tap water, especially in places where the starting water just isn't that great to begin with. It also is solar powered and looks like it could be pretty scalable, so it may be a viable option.
How does this work? If it's a sensible option in certain places (those without access to tap water), how can tap water be cheaper? Why wouldn't everybody just bring tap water to those places as well if it was cheaper?
It might still be more expensive but more resilient to other external factors such as embargoes, wars, whatever might influence delivery of other water sources. Cost isn't the only factor to decide what technology or solution should be implemented.
It is usually the driving factor in our global economy.
I don't see how your point makes sense - transport can easily make tap water more expensive than salt water, but you're acting like it's literally impossible for transportation costs to be higher than desalination costs. Why?
Wait a few years.
My presumption is that the desalinated water might be cheaper than tap, but would still require further processing to be considered potable, which would raise the price on par or above conventionally sourced tap water. I imagine there’s a lot of costal areas though with ready access to saltwater and minimal access to freshwater where it’s worthwhile.