All in the pipeline

According to statistics from the State Oceanic Administration, the country collects about 40 billion cubic meters of freshwater from rainfall every year. Still, 400 cities throughout China have been subject to droughts in recent times.

In the past, when local companies ran out of freshwater they had to buy it from other cities at high cost. The limited supplies increased the cost of production and restricted the development of local companies.

Water shortages have been eased with more desalination programs moving into the island, but not all islands are able to access freshwater all the time.

"Most seawater desalination programs are funded by State-controlled companies due to the very high costs," Yang says.

The development center plans to be among the world's top three producers in the sector by 2020 and take a bigger market share from larger competitors at home and aboard.

No private companies in Zhoushan have the ability to offer a comprehensive desalination system and the development center is supporting more than 90 percent of the desalination programs in the islands.

The distillation method is popular particularly in the Middle East but experts in Zhoushan prefer the membrane process as Zhoushan does not have enough power stations to provide efficient heat for distillation.

"The electricity cost for the distillation method is much higher than that for the membrane process," Yang says.

In the past two years, the center has reduced power consumption for producing one ton of fresh water in the membrane process from 8 kilowatt-hours down to 3 kilowatt-hours.

More desalination projects have been carried out in China in the past two years but the total number is still smaller than that of other countries.

Many companies and organizations have plans to cooperate with Zhejiang, which is expected to fuel the desalination industry.

But the size of the programs depends on the planned size of the local economy.

"We have cooperation with international programs and we hope to promote our skills and technologies in other countries," Yang says.