Relatively pure water is an important ingredient for almost everything. In almost every residence it is used for washing clothes, dishes, residential surfaces and occupants. Although i will not go into the gory details about how commercial and industrial firms use water, there are a huge number of functions it performs for each.
One of the main advantages of water is its price: it’s really inexpensive. Where I live in the SF Bay Area, we get most of our water from rainfall on nearby mountains, but since we get little rain from May through September. During drought years some communities are forced to use salty or brackish water and desalinate it, which increases its price. Reverse Osmosis is the most popular process for desalinating water, whether it is brackish water or seawater.
Our last dry-spell (I wouldn’t classify it as a drought) was in the rain-years 2020/2021 and 2021/2022. The rain-years 2022/2023 and 2023/2024 have had above normal precipitation. However, our droughts are frequent (see the chart in the Intro of this paper or the Main Image).