Optimal Investment of a Hybrid Renewable System considering Desalination Units to Supply Electrical Energy and Drinking Water of Abu-Musa Island

With increasing demand for fresh water and reduction in the investment cost of the renewable energy technologies, many of remote areas and small islands like the Abu-Musa Island are considered as potential markets for renewable energy based desalination systems. Therefore, in this paper, optimal investment of an off-grid hybrid renewable system is studied to supply customers electrical energy demand, as well as electrical and thermal energies required by the desalination units to provide drinking water consumed in the island. The simulation results for different desalination methods including multi-stage flash, multi-effect distillation, and reverse-osmosis are considered and analyzed. According to the results, although the average energy consumed in order to produce drinking water has the lowest value in reverse-osmosis method in comparison with the other two methods, but, the system net cost in the multi-effect distillation method is lower than the other two methods.