Huge energy consumption is always essential in large-scale desalination technology, and relevant adverse impact on the surroundings from the concentrated solution with high salinity is ignored. In the paper, a zero-emission desalination system (ZEDS), including the single stage and the multi-stage, based on mechanical vapor compression (MVC) is proposed. Mathematical models of the desalination system corresponding to the proposed ZEDS are established, and then energy and exergy analysis are achieved to investigate the performance of the desalination system. It is found that the MVC based desalination system is available to achieve the aim of zero-emission. The simulation results both from the energy and exergy analysis show that the design of the multi-stage ZEDS is beneficial to reduce the total compressor power compared to the single stage system although the profit magnitude will decrease with the increase of the stage number. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.