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The future of large-scale solar interfacial desalination

Nature Sustainability volume 8, pages 123–124 (2025)Cite this article

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Solar interfacial desalination could enable the sustainable production of freshwater, but scale-up remains challenging. Now, analysis of the efficiency and costs of a large-scale interfacial desalination system operating outdoors over nearly four months suggests that scale-up is associated with high capital investment and a lower water production rate compared with laboratory-scale devices.

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Fig. 1: Large-scale implementation of SID and its cost evaluation.

References

  1. Sadoff, C. W., Borgomeo, E. & Uhlenbrook, S. Rethinking water for SDG 6. Nat. Sustain. 3, 346–347 (2020). This comment article presents the call for the sustainable development of water resources.

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  2. Ghasemi, H. et al. Solar steam generation by heat localization. Nat. Commun. 5, 4449 (2014). This paper reports an early demonstration of solar steam generation.

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This is a summary of: Chen, Y. et al. Large-scale implementation of solar interfacial desalination. Nat. Sustain. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01485-6 (2025).

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The future of large-scale solar interfacial desalination. Nat Sustain 8, 123–124 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01497-2

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