DOI: 10.5176/2251-189X_SEES13.13
Authors: Akbar Adibfar, Khalil Behbahani & Elham Shirkhodaee Tari
Abstract:
There are 58 islands in the Persian Gulf, where 40 of them are inhabited and benefit from the adequate infrastructure. As none of these islands have access to natural potable water, consequently, provision of the required potable water is achieved by either thermal or osmosis desalination plants. Provision of energy for thermal plants namely; Multi Effect Distillation (MED) and Multi Stage Flash (MSF) methods are through fossil fuels and these methods are only utilized for large capacities with no flexibility for lower capacities and continuous fuel supply for all the islands are uneconomical.
Hence, provisions of energy for desalination plants are inevitably limited to electricity, where two methods of Reversed Osmosis (RO) and Mechanical Vapor Compression (MVC) are operated by electricity. Considering that supply of electricity from the national grid for all the islands owned by the five countries (Iran, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Kuwait) are either impossible or uneconomical, there are only two practical alternative renewable energy methods namely: Wind and Solar in Distributed Generation (DG) format feasible in these territories.
Required energy from the wind seems as the best solution and at the same time cost of a wind power plant is cheaper and need lesser area compared to an equivalent solar plant. As blow of wind from land to the sea and vice versa is a perpetual phenomenon, study of the wind turbines for provision of a desalination plant's electricity has been considered.
Generation of potable water by means of wind turbines makes storage of the absorbed energy from the wind cheap and possible. Therefore, the pivot of this paper is focused on the desalination method in the islands by means of wind turbines as well as analyzing the technical and economical parameters.
Keywords: Wind farm, Desalination plat , Persian Gulf Islands.
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