On electric power and desalted water production in Kuwait

The Ministry of Electricity and Water (MEW) in Kuwait issues annual reports showing the efforts made to satisfy the continuous increasing demands of p ower and desalted water, status of the operating plants, projects under con struction, and future planning. Careful reading of the reports is required for better understanding of power and desalted water production economics, and better planning and utilization of the available resources. The publish ed data in the 2000 MEW statistical books on power and desalted water revea l some of the main characteristics of the cogeneration power desalting plan ts in Kuwait, and raise some concern and comments that are reported in this paper such as: (1) MEW future planning is coping very well with electric p ower demand, but can face real shortage of fresh water in the immediate nea r future; (2) Desalting seawater is done using the MSF desalting method. Th e MSF system is not energy efficient. It consumes about three times the equ ivalent energy consumed by reverse osmosis (RO), which only consumes mechan ical (pumping) energy. (3) There is mismatching between power production (d epends on load) and process heat required by the operating MSF desalting un its. (4) Demands of electric power and desalted water are continuously incr easing, as does the need for installing new power and desalting plants. The re is real need to rationalize the public use of water and power. (5) Varia tion of electric power demands is significant due to power consumed by A/C units. (6) Operation of powerplants is at low capacity most of the year, du e to part-load operation, except for a few hours at peak demand in summer. This means inefficient use of fuel energy and existing equipment. (7) High cost of generating power and desalted water. (8) Low fuel cost estimation b y MEW. These points are discussed in this paper. The paper also introduces a method to allocate fuel energy consumption between desalted water and ele ctric power production and use it to estimate the cost of each product. It also discusses future forecasting for power and water needs, turbine unit s ize choice, and how to reduce power and desalted water consumption.