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Energy-water-environment nexus is very important to attain COP21 goal, maintaining environment temperature increase below 2 o C, but unfortunately two third share of CO2 emission has already been used and the remaining will be exhausted by 2050. A number of technological developments in power and desalination sectors improved their efficiencies to save energy and carbon emission but still they are operating at 35% and 10% of their thermodynamic limits. Research in desalination processes contributing to fuel World population for their improved living standard and to reduce specific energy consumption and to protect environment. Recently developed highly efficient nature-inspired membranes (aquaporin & graphene) and trend in thermally driven cycle's hybridization could potentially lower then energy requirement for water purification. This paper presents a state of art review on energy, water and environment interconnection and future energy efficient desalination possibilities to save energy and protect environment.

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This paper presents a solar-assisted direct contact membrane distillation (DCMD) system with novel energy recovery concepts for a continuous 24-hour-a-day operation. A temperature modulating scheme is introduced to the solar-thermal system that supplies feed seawater to the DCMD modules. This scheme attenuates extreme temperature fluctuations of the feed water by storing the collected energy during solarpeak hours and reutilizing it throughout the day. Thus, the energy savings is realized yet the feed seawater temperature is maintained within the preferred range. Additionally, the system employs heat recovery from the permeate and brine streams to the feed seawater. The simulations for such a system with a shelland-tube type DCMD modules are carried out to examine the spatial property variations and the sensitivity of system performance (i.e., transmembrane pressure, permeate flux and performance ratio) to the operating conditions (inlet temperature and flow rate) and the fiber dimensions (fiber length and packing density). It is found that there are trade-off between mean permeate flux and performance ratio with respect to permeate inlet temperature and flow rate and between total distillate production and performance ratio with respect to packing density. For the solar-assisted DCMD system having evacuated-tube collectors of 3360 m 2 with 160 m 3 seawater storage tanks and 50 DCMD modules, the annual solar fraction and collector efficiency are found to be 77% and 53%, respectively whilst the overall permeate production capacity is 31 m 3 /day. The overall specific thermal energy consumption of DCMD system with heat recovery is found to be 436 kWh/m 3 and it is about 43% lower as compared to the system without heat recovery. It is observed that the specific thermal energy consumption decreases significantly by 55% with increased collector area from 1983 m 2 to 3360 m 2 whereas the specific electrical energy consumption increases slightly by 16%.