New York time article, page-19

I used to think that CETO 5 pumped seawater into the turbines on land, and that the spent seawater then returned to the sea at the turbine outlet.

Then some time back now, but on this site, that view was corrected. It was stated there was a closed loop between the pumps and the turbine and that some pressure from the returning fluid was needed to help return the buoy and the pump to the start of the upstroke; ready for the next wave. Also, the liquid in the closed loop, (while relatively neutral so it did not provide any environmental risks if it escaped), was not going to be sea water. This also removed the corrosive effect of seawater from the turbines and the pumps, thus extending their lives.

The reverse osmosis desalination plant, I read here, is connected to the CETO 5 unit only by virtue of it taking power from the CETO5 generators to drive the pumps in the containerised desalination plant. Indeed, initially, the desalination plant was run on mains supplied power, before it was connected to the CETO5 power plant.

Given this, which is what I read here, there is no apparent (to me at least) reason to consider the CETO 5 unit superor to the CETO 6 unit because it has desalination ability that the CETO6 unit is not capable of. That is not correct. Surely it is just a matter of using CETO generated power to drive packaged desalination modules, no matter what version of CETO is in the water.

The differentiation between the two models that I see is that the smaller CETO 5 design is best for close in-shore situations, where it is economical to circulate fluid between the buoys and the power plant, while the larger CETO 6 units generate power internally within the bouy, and are best placed further off shore where the waves are bigger and can drive the large bouys.

Desalination is simply a matter of delivering prepackaged desalination units to a foreshore facility and hooking the desalination plant up to CETO power, no matter which CETO model generates the power.

Please let me know if I have missed something.