A framework for investigating the interactions between climate, dust, solar power generation and water desalination processes in Desert Climate

Increasing water demand in Saudi Arabia due to rapid population growth has forced the rapid expansion of seawater desalination plants in order to meet both current and future freshwater needs. Saudi Arabia has a huge potential for solar energy, hence, solar-powered desalination plants provide an opportunity to sustainably address the freshwater demand in the kingdom without relying on fossil fuels energy. However, the desert climate of Saudi Arabia and limited access to the open ocean imposes several challenges to the expansion and sustainability of solar-powered desalination plants. For example, the frequent and intense dust storms that occur in the region can degrade solar panels and significantly reduce their efficiency. Moreover, the high salinity Arabian Gulf is both the source of feedwater and sink of hypersaline discharge (brine) for many plants in the east of the Kingdom, and the brine may alter the salinity, temperature and movement of the water thereby reducing the quality of the feedwater to the desalination plants. Here, we propose a framework to investigate the different interactions between climate, dust, solar power generation and seawater desalination in order to identify optimal parameters such as locations of solar panels and seawater intake for sustainable implementation of solar-powered desalination plants. This framework integrates several numerical models including regional climate, hydrodynamics, Photovoltaics (PV) and Photovoltaic-Reverse Osmosis (PV-RO) models that are used to investigate these interactions for a solar-powered desalination plant at AlKhafji on the Northeastern coast of Saudi Arabia.