Environmental and economic assessment of the combination of desalination powered by renewable energies in Morocco

Morocco is a country of north-west Africa, that is constantly struggling with water scarcity issues. At the same time, Morocco has a very important potential for renewable energy in the form of wind and solar energy. One of the opportunities Morocco could use to tackle the problem of water scarcity would be to use renewable energies to power desalination plants. That way, freshwater is provided with the help of abundant renewable energy resources. To test this opportunity, a small-scale pilot plant will be installed in Ouarzazate with concentrated photovoltaic panels as the energy source and a vanadium flow battery as storage media. In this master thesis, the pilot plant has been used as a base to understand the energy flows in the system and analyze the opportunity of desalination by renewable energies in Morocco, from an environmental as well as from an economic perspective. The concentrated photovoltaic station has been simulated in the software SAM and the energy flows have been simulated on Excel. From an economic perspective, the results show that powering the desalination station by renewable energy performs less well than powering the desalination plant by the grid, as it costs 50% more. However, from an environmental perspective, the carbon impact could be reduced by 81%. By applying a carbon tax on the desalination system, the desalination powered by renewable energies can potentially perform better from an economic perspective as well, depending on the price of the carbon tax. The same method has been applied to a real case on a mining desalination plant, and the results showed that the renewable energy system’s performance lowered, proving that the calculation method of this study can be reproduced, but the results have to be assessed on a case-by-case basis