SILLE,

You have been given the answer in the link supplied above to Dr Alan Williams' web page. The information is in a section of the paper headed "Cost of Desalinated Water".

Dr Williams quotes a projected cost under a reduced-pressure distillation scenario of the order of $0.28/m3. A cubic metre is equivalent to one kilolitre. I remember reading somewhere in his paper Dr Williams warns that his cost estimates are all quoted in US $.

(Now there's a curiosity for you! The dollar sign was derived from the monogram for the United States, and hence the TWO vertical strokes through the "S" in proper representations of the symbol for the REAL dollar. And here I sit in front of a Microsoft keyboard that has a dollar sign with only ONE vertical stroke. That is the official symbol for the Australian dollar! Australia must be going to rule the financial world! Or at least Bill Gates must have thought so at some point. You saw it first on OLO!)

Dr Williams says, in this section that "The cost of desalinated water from the world’s most recent large plants is about $0.5/m3". He also says "The running costs of the solar desalination plant would be very low with its fuel free. This order of magnitude calculation indicates that large scale solar desalination could compete with present desalination technologies."

Have you ever risked standing for Parliament anywhere SILLE? You seem to have the prequalification of being unable to digest anything that isn't on one A4 piece of paper containing a lot of blank space. You need to read more widely, and for context, if you wish to avoid that fate!

Just to make it perfectly clear, I think when Dr Williams refers to "the worlds most recent large plants" he is referring to conventional fossil-fuelled distillation and/or reverse-osmosis plants. This is not what desalination is really all about. It is about true independence of both fresh water and energy supplies, particularly in countries like this. Wake up, Australia!

Any fossil fuel fired processes could most likely be replaced by a combination of wind,steam and bio-fuel power.Burning seawater thru RF is just around the corner with great potential for perpetuating energy.(see
http://youtube.com/watch?v=h6vSxR6UKFM
What I am sure of is that Australia with all it's bright minds is in a favorable position to come up with great solutions, and I don't mean just using or building on old ideas.

It is silly to go down the desal path until the amount we pay for water matches the cost of desal. Otherwise you are just subsidising the waste of a very expensive resource.

Freediver,

I have no doubt that the price we pay for water will rise to meet the costs of desalination. The price doesn't have to go up very much to achieve that.

At the moment we have an undesirable situation where people are restricted in how they can use water, rather than being allowed to use as much as they're willing to pay for, as is the case with other commodities.

Sylvia.

It has to go up a long way to achieve that. Desalination of seawater is rediculously expensive. Rather than building desal plants, we should just raise the price now. We should have raised the price a long time ago. It's the best way to discourage the waste of water. Unfortunately now we only even pay attention when the rivers have long been sucked dry.

Freediver

What do you think the price would have to be?

Sylvia.