What is fresh water? Don't be too quick to say it's a precious natural resource. To me fresh water is energy. There is heaps of water on earth it may just not be where or in the form that you want it at the time that you want it. You will get fresh water anywhere you want it in any quantity if you are willing to provide the energy and infrastructure to get it there. To me energy and infrastructure are fairly similar too as infrastructure is produced at its source by energy.

When we look at conventional forms of water supply consisting of dams and piping systems we don't see the huge energy costs involved or the massive environmental damage caused by these schemes. The biomass destroyed in the flooding on the valleys upstream of the dams alone adds millions of tonnes of green house gases to the atmosphere.

Building the associated dams and infrastructure utilise massive resources in the construction and manufacture of the component parts. Once operational we then forget about the massive pumping that has to be undertaken to get the water to the point of supply at the pressure we want to use it at. In many cases the electrical usage of present systems rival that of desalination systems. For example Sydney Water has always been one of the biggest users of electricity in the state of NSW.