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Comment by floatrock

Capital costs vs. marginal costs.

You're going to build a $100M desalination plant and run it for three hours a day? That's a ton of money sitting idle most of the day, far more than what is recovered with zero operating costs.

(This is called the utilization factor -- how long a piece of equipment is used vs. staying idle)

Ideally you want useful processes with low capital costs and expensive marginal/energy costs. Desalination is not one of those.

parent floatrock 8 years ago

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