Characterisation of the coupling of multi-effect distillation plants to concentrating solar power plants

The aim of this work is to analyse whether the integration of Multi-Effect Distillation (MED) process into Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants can be more competitive, under certain conditions, than the independent freshwater and power production by connecting a Reverse Osmosis (RO) system to a CSP plant. For this purpose, different CSP + MED configurations using the steam from the turbine as the thermal energy source of the desalination process have been evaluated and compared to the simple combination of a CSP plant connected to a RO plant. A sensitivity analysis has been carried out varying different parameters of the whole system (the specific electric consumption and the exhaust steam temperature) and calculating in each case the overall thermodynamic efficiency of the combined system for the same net production of electricity and desalinated water. This analysis has been performed for the three types of cooling methods usually employed in power plants (dry cooling, once-through and evaporative water cooling) and the results have been discussed in detail.