TECHNO-ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF A PHOTOVOLTAIC POWER PLANT SUPPLYING ELECTRICITY FOR A LARGE SCALE REVERSE OSMOSIS DESALINATION UNIT IN AGADIR, MOROCCOJustin Casimir

Sammanfattning: Legislation about the water use in Morocco including the watering of green spaces is about to change. Indeed, the watering of green spaces will have to be made from waste water treatment plant. This report focuses on a golf course located in Agadir which is subject to the new regulation. The option studied through this paper is the desalination of salt water powered by solar energy. This paper focuses specifically on the generation of solar energy. The aim of the report is to compare the levelized cost of water express in €/m3 for three different alternatives: A) water from the drinking water plant; B) water from a reverse osmosis desalination plant driven by electricity from the national grid; C) water from a reverse osmosis desalination plant driven mainly by solar energy and some electricity from the national grid.The paper will first present the boundary conditions for the case study (part I), the technical analysis (part II-A & B) and then the economic analysis (part II-C). Part III presents the results, based on the simulation results from the software PVsyst, for both the technical and economic analysis and part IV explains the technical part in more detail.In the conclusion, the writer of the report would recommend to another in depth economic analysis in few years as the capital cost for the system with the reverse osmosis desalination plant and the photovoltaic plant is at the moment too high. However, regarding at the levelized cost of water, this case study become competitive with the other alternative. Moreover, looking at the environmental issues (water depletion, greenhouse gas emission) one could decide to take action and therefore take some economic risks.