With solar energy prices plummeting, it may make sense during peak production hours to use it to do desalination and/or extract water from the air, depending on where you are.
It's like trying to use a hammer to screw some bolts. The priority should be sustainable development. We have enough water, just not great usage. The water infrastructure we have today is aged and needs to expand to allow for the population growth the country has seen. On top of that, we are expanding cities in parts of the country where water is scarce. We are growing water intensive crops in parts of the country th…
We may have enough water for now but we're using it faster than it can be replenished; our reserves in aquifers is starting to run out.
I watched the documentary Day Zero [1] last year about the global water crisis. I highly recommend anyone interested in what's going on with water to watch it. It was one of those oh shit movies where on one hand, you're glad you learned something important and on the other hand, you kinda wish you could have stayed blissfully ignorant because of how scary the situation actually is.
For example, the Ogallala Aquifer [2] covers approximately 174,000 square miles across 8 states—South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas. It's one of the largest aquifers in the world.
Of all the water that's extracted from it, only 10% gets replenished. That's obviously not sustainable, especially with climate change, increasing municipal and farming use.
We're not going to desalinate our way out of this all over the world.