A methodology for analyzing renewable energy opportunities for desalination and its application to Aruba.

There are numerous possible technology combinations for providing desalination using renewable energy sources. This paper presents a model that captures facets ranging from hourly availability of the renewable energy sources to economic parameters such as inflation and discount rate without relying on third-party software. The proposed approach considers different combinations of reverse osmosis and multi-stage-flash distillation driven by wind, solar PV and solar thermal with reference systems driven from the electric grid or natural gas. The levelized cost of water and the primary energy usage are presented as the main indicators for the performance of the different system architectures. Aruba is chosen as an example to show an application of the model. The project duration and the efficiency of desalination technologies is used to demonstrate the model capability for sensitivity analyses. The authors provide all used equations in the supplemental material to this paper. • Modeling desalination systems including the desalination technologies SWRO and MSF and the energy sources wind, solar PV, solar thermal, electric grid and natural gas • Complete model without need for third party software • All equations in supplemental material [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]