Sydney: early desalination plant results encouraging

The developers of a prototype desalination plant off Port Kembla, south of Sydney, say early results using wave energy are favourable.

"We were drawing the water up from the ocean there off the breakwater, we've just got the results back from an independent test lab and the water samples passed all of the Australian drinking water standards, so we've proved that we can produce drinking water out of the ocean with zero emissions and [it is] a very low cost solution," Mr Bell from Energetech Australia said.

"We've proved that at a relatively low cost compared to a dedicated desalination plant, we can create drinking water and we think that has a lot of applications obviously in the current Australian situation," he said.

Mr Bell says work is under way to build similar plants in Portland Victoria, as well as Spain, England and New York.

See - ABC News - desalination plant results.