Co-ordination Action for Autonomous Desalination Units ... - ADU-RES

4.1.3 Wind Turbine electrical coupled to a RO plant, AEROGEDESA ® Project, Gran
Canaria
a. Introduction
The plant has been installed in Pozo Izquierdo, Gran Canaria Island. The plant
commissioned in 2003, started its operation at the end of 2004 and is still in
operation. The project has been financed by the Government of the Canary Islands
(FEDER) and has been carried out by Instituto Tecnologico de Canarias, ITC. The
scope of the project was the electrical coupling of a commercial wind turbine to a RO
unit for seawater desalination, operating under a constant regime and managing the
storage and available wind energy use through minimum battery bank. The battery
bank mainly guarantees that the washing system is filled with fresh water, providing
a longer working life of the membranes. The whole system is fully automatic. The
wind speed at the area is ranged from 4.5 to 13 m/s.
b. System Description
The system consists of a 15 kW Wind turbine (by VERGNET, France), a 190 Ah lead
acid battery bank, an inverter and a 0.80 m 3 /hr Reverse Osmosis unit (by Tecnologia
Canaria del Aqua and ITC). The RO unit consists of 2 pressure vessels in series with
2 membranes each (SW30-4040). The salinity of the feed water is 35.500 ppm TDS.
The produced water has a salinity of less than 500 ppm TDS. The nominal pressure
of operation of the RO unit is 55 bar and the recovery ratio is of 37%. The highpressure
pump, which is the main load of the RO unit, is 7.5 kW. The pump motor is
a three-phase motor. The energy consumed by the RO unit is 7 kWh/m 3 . The
pretreatment system consists only of filtration (sand filter and cartridge filter). No
chemical addition. A fresh water storage tank of 250m 3 is also available.
The hours of RO‘s operation depend on the availability of the wind, which are in
winter: 15 hr/day in average and in summer: 20 hr/day in average.
The power supply system consists of a wind turbine with a rated power of 15 kW, a
three-phase self exciting induction generator for a static condenser battery, a
charger and a three-phase sine-wave inverter, both micro-processed. It also has
battery storage with autonomy of more than 1 hour.
The RO unit adapted to a frequent start/stop configuration coupled to the system. It
is an electric coupling from a commercial wind turbine of 15 kW to RO unit, operating
WP2 ADU-RES 27