Economic comparison between RO-wind and RO-PV desalination systems

Research and development of desalination technologies are becoming highly critical because of the rapid increase in freshwater demand. Researchers are continually working on improving the existing desalination technologies and exploring new methods and ideas to desalinate salty water. The main goal is to come up with cost-effective systems. Renewable energy desalination is becoming an attractive option nowadays because of its viability of producing fresh water, technology improvement continuation, limitation of conventional sources and compatibility between water needs and renewable resources availability. More importantly, using renewable energy to power desalination systems is extremely important for reducing global emissions and protecting the environment. This research is an attempt to provide a systematic methodology for determining the most cost-effective combination of renewable energy powered reverse osmosis desalination system for a given location and required capacity. Two combinations are compared which are RO-Wind and RO-PV. Results show that for Dhahran, Saudi Arabia cost of water produced by RO-Wind is 1.366 $/m3 to 1.273 $/m3 and by RO-PV is 2.119 $/m3 to 2.048 $/m3 for a system capacity of 1000 m3 to 10,000 m3, respectively.