1.794 kilowatt-hours. That is what, according to a Canary government release carried by Veolia, the experimental DESALRO 2.0 plant needs to produce one cubic metre of water. Guinness World Records certified it in December 2025 as the lowest-energy desalination plant in the world.
Why does such a small number matter? Because in the Canaries water is largely a question of energy. The Spain Smart Water Summit, now in its tenth edition, ran in Madrid from 29 September to 1 October, with more than a hundred representatives of administrations, operators and tech firms. On day one, from 16:45 to 18:30, a session titled “Water management in the Canary Islands” featured Fernando Azcárate Camino, director of Water Cycle and Next Generation Funds Projects at the Canary government, and Carla Ylenia Trujillo Pulido, director of the PERTE at EMMASA in Tenerife.
El Espejo Canario sums up the challenges: heavy reliance on desalination, high energy costs, water systems physically separated between islands, and tourism pressure on demand. It presents digitalisation, meaning monitoring and data use to anticipate demand, as a way to contain those costs, not merely an environmental goal.
One example from the programme: a sponsor, SCUBIC, cites its work at EMALSA’s Las Palmas III plant, where machine learning predicts demand and picks the most efficient mix of production lines. That’s promotional material and should be read as such, but it shows the kind of tools involved.
And at Pozo Izquierdo, Gran Canaria? DESALRO 2.0 was led by the Instituto Tecnológico de Canarias with Next Generation EU money. According to El Apurón, reporting the results in May 2024, it uses under 2.0 kWh/m³, about 25% less than a conventional design, with a capacity of 2,500 m³ a day and operating since December 2023. It’s modular and compact, useful in emergencies or to supplement existing plants, and its designs are being used in expansions in the islands and considered for private projects on the mainland.
The wider picture, from the same source and with data of that date: 28 large plants with over 480,000 m³ a day of capacity, 11 in Gran Canaria, 7 in Fuerteventura, 5 in Tenerife, 3 in Lanzarote and 2 in El Hierro, running at 75% of capacity. On desalination’s share of electricity the article gives two different figures, 17% of total consumption and 6.2% of generated electricity (2022 data), without explaining the gap. Better not to pick one.
An open question remains: how much of this efficiency will leave the lab. A 2,500 m³-a-day plant is small next to the network, and a consumption record says nothing about maintenance costs or network losses. On those, the sources I read are silent.
