ELI5 Why we can’t use giant domes to create large scale water desalination.

Question

See, the idea would be to use a huge glass dome to catch evaporated water over the ocean. And a trough around the sides of the dome would funnel into a pipe to take the water to be further treated. The problem for me is that this idea seems so obvious that there has to be a reason why it’s not already happening.

To specify, I meant using a series of small domes just off shore. Let’s say 50 ft. diameter and you just build a lot of them like a solar panel grid.

In: Engineering

Answer 1

The main reason I suppose is that we already do that. It’s the atmosphere and it cant be beat in scale. Second reason I suppose is it’s cost prohibitive.