Energy Efficiency of Desalination: Fundamental Insights from Intuitive Interpretation

Desalination has become an essential toolset to combat the worsening water stress resulting from population and industrial growth and exacerbated by climate change. Various technologies have been developed to desalinate feedwater with a wide spectrum of salinity. While energy consumption is an important consideration in many desalination studies, it is challenging to make (intuitive) sense of energy efficiency due to the different mechanisms of various desalination processes and the very different separations achieved. This perspective aims to provide an intuitive, thermodynamics-based interpretation of energy efficiency by illustrating how energy consumption breaks down into minimum energy of separation and the irreversible energy dissipation. The energy efficiencies of different desalination processes are summarized and rationalized based on their working mechanisms. Notably, a new concept called the minimum mean voltage is proposed as a convenient tool to evaluate the energy efficiency of electrochemical desalination processes. Lastly, the intrinsic trade-off between energy efficiency and desalination rate and the relevance of energy efficiency in different desalination applications are discussed.