Techno-economic model for desalination plant, supplied by renewable energy.

The problem of desalinized water production in a reverse osmosis plant using energy sourced from renewable sources is addressed in this work. Using recent historic data for natural energy elements (sun, wind, temperature), different plant configurations are proposed to supply the RO facility and look at minimizing the average cost of a delivered water liter. The process used to calculate the best configurations is described as an iterative semi-optimization, using discrete input data. Mitigating the investment costs and the needed supply constraint, some configurations emerge from the calculation process to produce desalinized water at costs comparable today’s market values. They leverage the benefits of solar and wind production as well as battery and water storages.