Desalination Corridors Run Dry of the One Thing Debated in Geneva

While the Concordat debates who owns a liter, the Tethys Hydrous Group is quietly rationing the electricity that turns seawater into one. Three of its megacity desalination corridors — serving Jakarta, Lagos and Karachi — are running below rated output this month, not for lack of brine but for lack of firm baseload during peak-heat evenings, the utility confirmed. "You cannot desalinate on good intentions; you desalinate on megawatts," said plant operations lead Fatima Adebayo, walking a Lagos intake gallery where a third of the reverse-osmosis trains sat idle at dusk. With the global mean anomaly holding at +2.8°C for a fifth straight month, evening cooling demand is cannibalizing the very power the plants need. Adebayo's crews now schedule production for the small hours, when the grid slackens. It is a thin margin, and everyone on the gantry knows it: the corridors the session is counting on to soften scarcity are themselves waiting on the grid the next desk is arguing about.