A Distributed Consensus Approach for Power and Water Co-Generation in Microgrids

A freshwater shortage can threaten the well-being of people and communities. With the growing global population and limited access to freshwater resources around the world, desalination has become an important technology for meeting the freshwater demand of communities. Desalination, the process of extracting freshwater from saline water, can be done in a centralized water processing plant or distributed at smaller desalination units. This paper investigates the integration of distributed desalination units within a microgrid for the dual optimization of water and energy generation by developing a distributed consensus algorithm to solve the economic dispatch problem for power and water co-generation. The simulation results validate the algorithm by finding the optimal generation capacity of each element in the microgrid while meeting the dynamic demands of power and water.