60253 - Potential of Micro Gas Turbines to Provide Renewable Heat and Power in Off-Grid Applications for Desalination and Industrial Wastewater Treatment 

As a result of the continuous technical and economic development of society in the last decades, the demand for all sort of resources has experienced and alarming rise: food, freshwater, energy and raw materials for the latest technologies. The pressing shortage of these resources is not found in low-income countries only, as it used to be the case in the past, but it also affects the more developed economies. This is the case for the very wealthy countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council, which are currently struggling with the lack of fresh water supply, or certain countries in Latin America where the contamination of natural water sources poses a major environmental problem.

In order to assess this water-energy nexus problem, this paper looks into systems where the production of renewable power is combined with either freshwater production through desalination or wastewater treatment for effluent control. Three enabling renewable energy technologies are assessed -solar micro gas turbines, wind turbines and photovoltaic panels-, all of which have already been proposed in literature as potentially integrable into water desalination and treatment facilities at the small to mid-scale. In all cases, off-grid installations are considered.

The paper describes the characteristics of these three systems and provides a comparison of technical specifications and costs. Wind and photovoltaic are the standard approach, as already proven by a number of pilot plants, but solar micro gas turbines exhibit additional flexibility (in particular when hybridisation is considered) and have the differential feature of producing not only electric power but also heat. This enables the combination of different types of water treatment technologies in order to either increase water production/recovery which, in turn, reduces the environmental impact of the production process associated (either freshwater or other good or service).