Feasibility analysis of wind and solar powered desalination plants: An application to islands

The integration of desalination plants and mineral production

The supply of freshwater is becoming an issue of increasing importance in many areas in the world. In arid areas, potable water is very scarce and the lives of people in these areas strongly depend on the amount of available water. Seawater desalination requires large amounts of energy and if this energy is produced by fossil fuels, it will have adverse impact on the environment. Therefore, renewable energy systems ( RES ) coupled to desalination units offer an attractive solution. Considerable research is under way to optimize the matching of renewable energy technologies with the corresponding desalination technologies and especially to reduce the energy required per unit volume of freshwater produced. The design, simulation, and optimization of the RES powered desalination units is an aspect of high importance in the planning and design phase of a project implementing desalination powered by renewable energy technologies. Therefore, new software packages combining the design of the RES and the desalination units were developed. Finally, great attention should be given to the environmental and socioeconomic sustainability of the renewable energy powered desalination units, failing to do so can lead to negative opinion of the community toward the installation of new systems.

The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources is imperative to mitigate climate change and achieve sustainable development goals (SGDs). Hydrogen, as a clean energy carrier, holds great potential for decarbonizing various sectors, yet its production remains predominantly reliant on fossil fuels. This study explores a novel approach to sustainable hydrogen production by integrating offshore wind energy with reverse osmosis (RO) desalination technology. The proposed configuration harnesses offshore wind power to energize both a RO desalination system and water electrolysis unit. Initially, the wind energy powers the RO desalination process, purifying seawater, and then desalinated water is directed to water electrolysis system for generating green hydrogen directly from seawater. The resulting renewable hydrogen holds potential for diverse applications, including marine industries, and can be transported onshore as needed. The RO system is configured to treat 20 kg s−1 of seawater with a salinity of 35 000 ppm, aiming for a high recovery ratio and reduced freshwater salinity. A pressure exchanger (PX) is integrated to recover energy from high‐pressure brine stream and transfer it to the low‐pressure feed water, thus reducing the overall energy consumption of the RO process. The concentrated brine extracted from RO desalination is proposed to be utilized for the production of sodium hydroxide that can further pretreat incoming seawater and enhance the effectiveness of the filtration process by mitigating membrane fouling. This pressure exchanger increases the energy efficiency of the RO system from 63.1% to 64.0% and exergetic efficiency from 13.9% to 18.2% increasing the overall first and second law efficiencies to 37.9% and 33.5%. By leveraging offshore wind power to drive RO desalination systems, this research not only addresses freshwater scarcity but also facilitates green hydrogen generation, contributing to the advancement of renewable energy solutions and fostering environmental sustainability.

Producing fresh water via sea- and brackish-water desalination is essential for arid, water-scarce regions, but it is expensive and energy-intensive. The cost of energy is a major contributor to this high cost and the use of fossil fuels that currently power desalination plants causes emissions of greenhouse gases and other hazardous pollutants. The recent cost reductions and efficiency advances of photovoltaic systems create opportunities for developing low-cost and emission-free desalination technologies. However, the adoption of PV-powered water desalination and reuse technologies is hampered by the lack of concepts and designs that are integral to the variability of the solar resources. This paper describes the status and prospects of PV-integrated grid-connected and autonomous desalination systems and presents a holistic approach accounting for the variable conditions of the solar resources in different regions of the world to advance the development and deployment of environmentally friendly water desalination technologies worldwide.

Desalination and atmospheric water harvesting technologies are highly desirable to produce freshwater for daily life activities and alleviate the global water crisis. Efforts to improve these have mostly been based on better engineering or materials design, but a comparison of their energy performance over a theoretical optimum is not well consolidated. This research conducts a meta-analysis that comparatively assesses existing atmospheric water harvesting and desalination technologies by evaluating the energy optimality in terms of the Gibbs free energy principle derived theoretical limit. After a review of the various existing technologies in these two classes, energy optimality, defined as the theoretical minimum specific energy consumption divided by the specific exergy consumption, is used as the metric to make a comprehensive and fair comparison of the various desalination and atmospheric water harvesting technologies. Results show that the vapor compression cycle and hybrid technologies-based atmospheric water harvesters have higher energy optimality of 12%, whereas others have much poorer performances of under 3%. For desalination, reverse osmosis yielded the highest energy optimality of 67.43%. Furthermore, the ideal energy optimality needed by atmospheric water harvesting to become comparable to desalination is at least 89.9%, which is almost impossible to practically achieve.

Impact of solar energy cost on water production cost of seawater desalination plants in Egypt

V-7-100 - Petroclival meningloma. Presigmoid approach

Chapter 15 - Environmental Life Cycle Analysis of Water Desalination Processes

Recent progress in renewable energy based-desalination in the Middle East and North Africa MENA region

Desalination plays critical role in filling the gap between fresh water demand and availability in water scarce Sultanate of Oman since 1976. Installed desalination capacity in the country has almost increased by 60 times that in 1976 with increasing fresh water demand. Even though desalination share in meeting the fresh water demand is increasing, 80-85% of fresh water demand today is still satisfied with ground water. This is leading to increased soil salinity in recent years affecting the crop production. All the planned and installed desalination plants in the country use conventional fuels for their operation. None of the plant is based on any form of renewable energy source. Consumption of fossil fuels for the operation of plants is increasing at an average rate of 3-5% affecting the net export for the country. Sultanate of Oman is considered to be one of the most suitable destinations for solar energy applications and can play a vital and sustainable role in meeting the gap between the demand and supply of fresh water using solar thermal desalination. This paper emphasizes on addressing this aspect for the country. An overview of present desalination status and fresh water demand, fuel requirements, solar energy availability, thermal desalination technologies and solar thermal technologies has been presented in the paper. Conventional thermal desalination and solar thermal technologies for same capacity have been compared for their suitability on the scale of 1 to 5 for various factors based on their suitability for Sultanate of Oman. This paper also discusses few of the challenges and barriers in implementation of solar thermal desalination in the country. Fixed focus type Scheffler dish reflectors (SDR) are suggested as one of the best option to be coupled with multi effect desalination technology for small to medium capacity decentralized type plants. Parabolic trough collectors (PTC) coupled with CCGT or OCGT plants would be a feasible solution for higher capacity desalination plants.

A theoretical analysis on upgrading desalination plants with low-salt-rejection reverse osmosis

Design of a small mobile PV-driven RO water desalination plant to be deployed at the northwest coast of Egypt

Electro-deionization (EDI) technology for enhanced water treatment and desalination: A review

Countries which do not have adequate supply of freshwater sources like Kuwait resort to using desalination plants to meet their demand. Kuwait had used Multi-flash desalination (MSF) plants sine the 50's of the last century to satisfy its ever increasing demand. Many new and more efficient and cost effective desalination technologies are currently available. Kuwait is in the process of building new desalination plants, and has to seize this opportunity to consider using other desalination technologies instead of MSF plants. In this work, an attempt to make to bring to the attention to the decision maker the performance and suitability of the different technologies using a fuzzy multi-criteria decision making technique. The preference is based on six criteria (factors) for comparing three commercially available desalination technologies, i.e., Multi-stage flash (MSF), Multi-effect desalination (MED), and Reverse osmosis (RO). The study found that the amount of energy used in these plants should be most important selection criteria followed by the amount of pretreatment required. The most preferred technology is RO according to this study.

Optimal design of a hybrid solar-wind power to drive a small-size reverse osmosis desalination plant