Like California and South Africa, isn’t the principle of water distillation relatively easy? evaporating from one end and cooling it from the other so that it becomes liquid again, leaving all the salt and pollutants behind.
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It’s easy, but it’s extremely expensive. Boiling water takes A LOT of power. You can try this yourself, put a pot of water on your hob and see just how long it takes for the entire pot to evaporate into steam.
Desalinating 1l of water by boiling requires 2.2 MJ of energy. Even using some of the lowest per person water usage in america (SF at 150 l/day), supplying all 39 million californians with desalinated drinking water would require 5.8 billion liters of water a day, which in turn would require 12.7 billion MJ of energy per day, or 3.5 billion kWh per day. That’s about half of the entire US’ current power consumption, and that would be JUST for california, and assuming that californians cut their water usage in half.
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