Energy Guzzling Desalination

It seems that Ken is completely green when it comes to desalination. By green I of course mean ignorant, not environmentally concious.

It is possible that Mayor Livingstone might have confused his technologies. Thermal desalination plants work by a kind of distillation process which boils off about a tenth of the seawater passing through, and are most economical when located near cheap sources of gas, such as the US and the Gulf. The plant Thames Water proposes for London would use reverse osmosis technology instead, putting water through membranes to lower its salinity.

It uses some 15% of the energy used by the type of plant that Ken was most probably thinking about.