Solar desalination: A sustainable solution to water crisis in Iran

Water has a significant role in all our daily activities and its overall consumption is growing every day because of increasing scheme of mankind living standards. Iran is located in the dry belt of the earth, where nearly 70% of its area is located in arid and semi-arid regions. At the present time, Iran is experiencing a serious water crisis. It has been projected that the total per capita annual renewable water of the country will reach to about 800 m3 by 2021, which is less than the global threshold of 1000 m3. In this context, seawater desalination seems to be a potential solution to meet the water supply and demand balance in Iran as the country is surrounded by three main water bodies of the Caspian Sea at northern and Persian Gulf and Sea of Oman at the southern borders. Annually, about 120 million cubic meter of freshwater supply is from conventional desalination plants centralized in the southern coastal regions of Iran. The fossil-fuel powered desalination systems are no longer sustainable to overcome the water crisis in the country due to both depletion risks of available energy resources and increase of greenhouse gas emissions. This is while that Iran has excellent solar energy potentials of about 15.3 kWh/m2/day, which can effectively be harnessed to run desalination processes. Therefore, in the modern time, solar desalination is an emerging solution to close the water gap in the country by considering the required change in terms of policy, financing, and regional cooperation to make this alternative method of desalination a success.