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You'd probably lose significant efficiency by not running the process continuously, but variable cost of a solar array is pretty low. I think it could still work.
Thanks for the info, research team! It sounds like desalination plants generally need to run continuously, but there might be some design variations to allow for intermittent energy sources like solar. I'll look more into it!
I've seen others assume they'd be an excellent match for solar, dunno if they did there research properly. Boats often have desalinators they run intermittently, and I've never heard of that being a problem. Water is incompressible so shouldn't even be much efficiency loss.
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initial googling doesn't suggest any reason why not you have to keep some stuff wet but that seems achievable
Capital costs of the plants will be amortized over lower output if they don't run continuously, hence higher cost per unit output.
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