The calculated solvation energies for the same set of molecules and ions from the COSMO-SMD model in NWChem and the experimental data from Minnesota solvation database (MNSOL) were also listed in Table . As seen in this table, our results from the hybrid AIMD/cDFT method are generally in good agreement with those by SMD and experiments with the smallest error of 1.6% when compared to both, which indicates that the hybrid model is capable of capturing solute-solvent interactions in solvation. It should be noted that for highly charged species such as sulfate, adding explicit waters improves the solvation energy in comparison with SMD and experiment, suggesting that hydrogen bonding between sulfate and water can be a significant contribution to the solvation of sulfate. For many implicit solvation models, the assumption that the electrostatic interactions of the solute and the surrounding solvent are independent of the molecular structure of the solvent and that the dielectric response of the medium is uniformly linear at all positions outside the region that defines the solute, may not accurately describe the solvent in the first solvation shell. This assumption is particularly poor when strong, specific interactions occur between a solute and one or more first-shell solvent molecules, for example, strong hydrogen bonding, π-π stacking interactions, or monatomic ions. Therefore, reliable calculations of solutes in solution must take into account not only bulk electrostatics, that is long-range electrostatic polarization effects, but also short-range polarization effects and short-range non-electrostatic effects such as cavitation, dispersion, and solvent structural effects, which encompass both hydrogen bonding and exchange repulsion effects. On the other hand, there is no thermodynamically unique way to separate the bulk electrostatic contribution from the non-bulk-electrostatic one in the free energy of solvation. Unlike explicit solvation models, our hybrid AIMD/cDFT model, and continuum solvation models such as SMD, use separate terms for the bulk-electrostatic and non-bulk-electrostatic energies.