Desalination Costs Ease Slightly After October's Price Shock

JAKARTA — The desalination-cost shock that the Cerulean Exchange logged on 29 October has eased by a few percent, but no one at the Tethys Hydrous Group intake station here is calling it relief. The plant supplies drinking water to districts whose reservoirs have run thin through a warming year, and its costs still sit well above the spring baseline. "The price came off its peak, not off our bill," said shift engineer Ratna Wijaya, watching pressure gauges on the reverse-osmosis line she has run for eleven years. Tethys operations directors attribute the easing to a pause in the megacity demand surge rather than any new supply. Across three water-stressed continents, the Oceanic & Atmospheric Assembly notes reservoir levels remain below seasonal norms as the global mean anomaly holds at +2.8°C. For Wijaya, the arithmetic is personal: the same feedwater that costs more to purify serves the ward where she was raised. "We don't get to stop when the market blinks," she said.