Techno-economic feasibility of solar based desalination through reverse osmosis

Abstract

The rapidly prevailing water scarcity issues has increased demand of brackish water desalination. The desalination using conventional energy is an energy intensive and expensive process. Luckily, the availability of solar energy offers an excellent opportunity to replace conventional energy with clean energy supply for desalination. The desalination employing reverse osmosis (RO) through photovoltaic (PV) technology seems an attractive solution. However, the techno-economic feasibility studies need to be carried out on area to area basis to assess its economic viability. In this study, techno-economic feasibility of solar based desalination system through RO system has been carried out for plant capacity of 500 L/h. The result shows that membrane productivity increases by increasing feed water temperature. The RO plant resulted 60% permeate productivity and 40% brine. A 20–25% PV power has been increased using three point manual tracking of PV system while 5–10% increase in PV power has been found due to cooling of PV system. The cost per liter of permeate is calculated to be PKR 0.72 resulting payback period of solar PV based RO system as 1.83 years.