That's great news! Now if they can solve the same problem with sea water, California, Arizona and Nevada can reduce their reliance on the Colorado river and grow more crops. It is only a matter of time before it's solved. Great work, MIT!
It’s a great application, but electrodialysis on seawater takes more power—-so much that distillation is competitive. The use-case chosen is remote freshwater wells which suffer from naturally-occurring arsenic. I can only think of a few others which can’t have heavy batteries.