Most electricity-generation requires water. Often this water is taken from natural water sources. This can create friction with local communities when water supplies run low. People need water. Livestock needs water. Agriculture needs water. Power plants need water.

Such conflicts can be resolved if power plants create their own water . For power plants in coastal areas, desalination is an attractive option.

Solar thermal technology, particularly parabolic trough concentrating solar power, is well-suited to meeting desalination's energy needs. Thermal desalination requires heat to desalinate water. Heat is what concentrating solar power creates. Reverse osmosis requires electricity, and this is a form of energy concentrating solar power also creates. Combining concentrating solar power with combined cycle gas turbines and molten salt storage, an interlocking bundle of technologies can provide generate heat, electricity, water and peak electricity supplies. It can do so reliabilty and cheaply.

Renewable energy such as solar photovoltaics is already used to power small-scale desalination, for instance of brackish water supplies in Outback aquifers. In Australia's major cities of Sydney and Perth electricity used in desalinaion will be offset through grid purchases of wind energy. While this wind-through-the-grid solution reduces the energy footprint of desalination, it has two disadvantages. First, it places upstream demands on the grid to deliver wind power to the desalination plant from remote locations. Second, buying wind energy doesn't allow synergies between water and power technologies to be reaped onsite.

Concentrating solar power and desalination is just one example of such synergies. Using geothermal energy for electricity generation and desalination is another. Biomass, wave and tidal electricity offer additional opportunities for integrated into the desalination plants of the future.