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Energy management and freshwater production are recent social concerns due to the population explosion. However, conventional liquid air energy storage (LAES) systems and desalination approaches face low efficiency and high energy consumption challenges. The present paper proposes a novel LAES system coupled with LNG cold energy, solar energy, and hydrate based desalination (HBD) to bridge the research gap at the intersection of electricity and freshwater production. The system develops the respective integration of external cold and heat sources in energy storage and release processes to strengthen the operational characteristics. Additionally, the proposed LAES employs HBD systems in LNG regasification and energy release processes, thus taking advantage of underutilized cold energy. The non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II is developed to obtain the optimum operating parameters regarding peak shaving and water production. The optimized system is thoroughly analyzed from the energy, exergy, and economic perspectives. The results indicate that the system with 2805.26 tons of daily freshwater production has an electrical round-trip efficiency of 145.57% and an exergy efficiency of 72.34%. A high positive net present value of 158.17 million USD is achieved. Overall, the efficient system, with superior techno-economic performance, provides an extraordinary alternative to enhance the energy management-water nexus in grid dimensions.
Lu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.