Economic Uncertainty Analysis for Renewable Energy Driven Desalination

Financial viability has a significant impact on the market penetration for most technologies. Thus, researchers conduct techno-economic assessments. Frequently, these employ many input parameters, several of which are both difficult to estimate and subject to unpredictable changes of the economy. The utility of techno-economic studies is therefore reduced for readers, since sensitivity of the results to changes of the input parameters remains hidden in the model. This paper proposes a generalized method and exercises it with a model for renewable energy driven desalination. The method is simple to apply but could make techno-economic assessments more informative and transparent. For the evaluated model, the main financial indicator is chosen to be the margin of levelized cost of water for renewable energy driven desalination over a reference process. Only six parameters change the main indicator by more than 1.5% given an absolute change of the input of 0.05. The final graph shows, that even in the worst-case scenario created in a combined parametric study, wind driven desalination is cost competitive for electricity prices greater than 6 cent per kWh. Desalination driven by photovoltaic produces water cheaper than the reference process for most scenarios but may be inferior at low electricity prices.