Optimizing Photovoltaic and Battery Integration for RO Desalination Using Differential Evolution Algorithm

Access to clean water is a basic human right, and reverse osmosis (RO) is a common method for producing potable water from seawater. However, the high energy demands of RO systems make them expensive to operate. Renewable energy sources (RES), such as photovoltaic (PV) systems, can reduce the energy costs associated with powering RO systems. In this paper, a novel approach that uses a differential evolution (DE) algorithm to optimize PV-Battery systems for RO desalination is proposed. (DE) is a heuristic, population-based algorithm that searches for the global optimal solution. The approach aims to minimize the Cost of Electricity (COE), and Cost of Water (COW) and ensure that Desalinated water costs are within an appropriate range. The algorithm was used in a case study of the city of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which faces significant water scarcity challenges. The results show that for an RO load demand of 1 kW, the optimized hybrid system's configuration includes a PV generation capacity of 9.145 kW and a battery size of 64.65 kWh. The COE is 0.425 $/kWh for Dhahran city, and the COW falls between 2.41 and 2.6 $/m³.