Optimal Management of the Desalination System Demand in Non-Interconnected Islands

The high energy consumption of desalination systems represents a significant opportunity for the application of demand response schemes, particularly for the case of Non-Interconnected Island (NII) systems. In particular, the optimal management of the desalination demand can be proven quite beneficial in increasing the Renewable Energy Sources' (RES) penetration, which is one of the main objectives in the day-ahead scheduling of the electricity system in Greek NIIs. This paper proposes a detailed representation of the desalination system, taking into account all the relevant constraints for the system's operation. The mathematical representation of the aforementioned operation is incorporated in the day-ahead scheduling (DAS) for the case of Greek NII systems in order to define the optimal operational scheduling of a desalination system. The proposed optimisation procedure is applied for the desalination system installed in the Greek island of Kythnos. The results of the analysis indicate that the DAS problem shall be fully aware of the capabilities of the desalination system in order to allow specific water flows (in and out of specific reservoirs) at specific hours of the day, allowing the optimal exploitation of the available RES produced energy.