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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Desalinating water requires A LOT of energy so it is very expensive. The natural water cycle does this on its own without the need for any human input. Therefore it will always be much cheaper to use a naturally occuring source of fresh water than to desalinate water ourselves.
So yes, you can make fresh water but it’s going to be dozens of even hundreds of times more expensive between buying and maintaining the equipment and energy costs.
Desalination is a *simple* idea but it is not physically *easy* because of the amount on energy it requires.
It is more efficient to treat ‘fresh’ water from rivers but the closer you are to the sea the more crap has gotten in the water. Treatment plants for coastal properties could be miles upstream so you’re depending on the infrastructure in between and you’re also last in line behind everyone further up the pipe.
Desalination (through distillation, filtration, whatever) takes a LOT of energy. Energy is not cheap. Technically feasible is not the same as economically or politically feasible.
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