I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll give you some water

Back in primary school, I thought I had a great innovative idea, the main part of which involved combining desalination of water and electricity generation. Years later, having discovered that reverse osmosis is all the rage for desal (and water recycling), I thought that maybe the idea had simply been overtaken. According to this Age article, though, maybe I wasn't as naive as I had begun to think.