Water Storage Instead of Energy Storage for Desalination Powered by Renewable Energy—King Island Case Study

In this paper, we scrutinized the energy storage options used in mitigation of the intermittent nature of renewable energy resources for desalination process. In off-grid islands and remote areas, renewable energy is often combined with appropriate energy storage technologies (ESTs) to provide a con...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Energies (Basel) 2016-10, Vol.9 (10), p.839-839
Main Authors: Tafech, Aya, Milani, Dia, Abbas, Ali
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
21st century
Alternative energy sources
Capital costs
Case studies
Compressed air
Desalination
Dynamics
Economics
Electric power
Electricity
Electricity distribution
Energy industry
Energy resources
Energy storage
Fuel cells
Heavy metal content
High temperature
Islands
King Island
off-grid desalination
Renewable energy
Renewable resources
Solar cells
Thermal energy
Topography
transient conditions
Water storage
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Summary:In this paper, we scrutinized the energy storage options used in mitigation of the intermittent nature of renewable energy resources for desalination process. In off-grid islands and remote areas, renewable energy is often combined with appropriate energy storage technologies (ESTs) to provide a consistent and reliable electric power source. We demonstrated that in developing a renewable energy scheme for desalination purposes, product (water) storage is a more reliable and techno-economic solution. For a King Island (Southeast Australia) case-study, electric power production from renewable energy sources was sized under transient conditions to meet the dynamic demand of freshwater throughout the year. Among four proposed scenarios, we found the most economic option by sizing a 13 MW solar photovoltaic (PV) field to instantly run a proportional RO desalination plant and generate immediate freshwater in diurnal times without the need for energy storage. The excess generated water was stored in 4 50 ML (mega liter) storage tanks to meet the load in those solar deficit times. It was also demonstrated that integrating well-sized solar PV with wind power production shows more consistent energy/water profiles that harmonize the transient nature of energy sources with the water consumption dynamics, but that would have trivial economic penalties caused by larger desalination and water storage capacities.
ISSN:1996-1073
1996-1073
DOI:10.3390/en9100839