Comment by arter45
1 day ago
It's not just pipes.
Filtering (from bacteria, pollution, ...) is another issue, and it also affects floods (floods are not periodic, so you have to store water, but storing water for a long term is not always safe).
Even desalination costs are not trivial in all countries.
Let's say 1 kWh = 50 gallons. UN estimates talk about at least 50 gallons/day per person.
According to Wikipedia [1], the 2023 average electricity consumption in Burkina Faso was 0.14 MWh (=140 kWh) a year per person.
Then there's gravity. If your main source of water comes from the sea, you have to pull water from a lower altitude to a higher altitude, which means you are going against gravity, which means you need pumps. Other energy is required.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
> Let's say 1 kWh = 50 gallons. UN estimates talk about at least 50 gallons/day per person.
The energy cost of desalination is to convert sea water into freshwater. A person utilizes lots of water per day, but that water doesn't magically disappear, nor get turned back into sea water. Treating wastewater takes about 1 kwh per 1000 gallons, or about .05 kwh per person per day which is 13% of the per capita electricity consumption of Burkina Faso.
Desalination and long range transport are necessary only for what little is irrecoverably lost due to for example evaporation, and for offsetting the deficit from normal freshwater sources due to over-consumption.