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Water scarcity has become one of the top risks, along with global warming, primarily caused by increasing energy usage. The problem of desalinating water that is a highly energy intensive process gets intensified due to its complex water-energy nexus. Our key objective is to break this nexus by introducing a hybrid solar-thermal multieffect desalination system. More specifically, to unlock the thermodynamic limitation and acquire the benefits of both the thermal (TVC) and mechanical vapor compressor (MVC), an attempt is made to hybridize them for integration with the multieffect distillation (MED) that consequently enhances the yield of water. Ensuring globally optimal performance of this hybrid MED-TVC-MVC configuration, it is proposed to further integrate with a solar cell with the aim of achieving carbon neutrality at the cost of increased capital investment. Imposing a carbon tax is inevitable, and with adding this, we finally explore the techno-economic feasibility of the sustainable solar MED-TVC-MVC. This novel desalination system secures zero carbon emission with reduced freshwater production cost (FWPC) and enhanced recovery ratio with respect to the real-time MED-TVC plant.
Mukherjee et al. (Wed,) studied this question.