A boom in desalination could create new opportunities for energy storage as developers seek to maximize output from assets powered by wind or solar.
“As soon as solar-plus-storage can compete with [traditional] generation prices, there will be a huge market,” said Thomas Hillig, managing director of Dr. Thomas Hillig Energy Consulting, a consultancy focused on off-grid energy markets.
“It’s pretty important to have high utilization, because the desalination equipment is very capital-intensive. After having done the investment, they want to run it as intensely as possible. If we go off-grid, there has to be storage because utilization has to be high.”
Currently the market for energy storage attached to desalination plants is still in its infancy because of the cost of batteries. With most desalination projects, “You pretty much have the choice of where to put them,” Hillig noted.
In such cases, developers will naturally tend to choose locations where energy is cheap and plentiful. Thus, for the vast majority of desalination plants today, solar-plus-storage is still “not feasible. It’s a nice concept; a market of the future,” he said.
But the picture is changing as demand for desalination grows and solar-plus-storage becomes more competitive. Currently, desalination serves around 1 percent of the global population, or almost 746 million people.
But desalination capacity increased 57 percent between 2008 and 2013, according the market research organization Global Water Intelligence (GWI) and the International Desalination Association.
GWI said desalination could be needed for up to 14 percent of the world population by 2025, based on United Nations figures for water scarcity. Renewable energy is already being considered as the power source of choice for many new desalination projects.
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