Abstract
The use of alternative water resources will become ever more important in the future, increasing the need for water desalination. Conventional desalination technologies, that is, multistage flash distillation, multieffect distillation, electrodialysis, and reverse osmosis, are well established but require high energy consumption. The coupling of these processes with salinity gradient power (SGP) offers the double benefit of decreasing the energy demand by the production of salinity gradient energy and by decreasing the salt concentration of the feed prior to desalination. Opportunities and challenges to combine SGP and desalination will be discussed in this chapter.