Seawater Reverse Osmosis Desalination-Based Renewable Energy: Classifications, Challenges, Methods of Driving, and Future Prospects

Water shortage is one of the biggest defiances in the world. Desalination becomes an essential strategy to secure fresh water. Reverse osmosis (RO) prevails the desalination market worldwide in terms of installed numbers and revenue. The fossil fuel-powered desalination process has harmful environmental impacts and is expensive. Renewable and abundant energy sources are an auspicious substitutional for powering the RO process. This review focuses on the RO process, its classifications, challenges (including membrane fouling and large-scale issues), integration of RO with other desalination processes, and integration with energy recovery devices (ERDs). Hybridization of RO with various renewable energy sources (RESs), focusing on solar, wind, and ocean energy, is also demonstrated, and a cost comparison between the different systems is presented. Environmental impacts and assessment of different RO systems, as well as the design of renewable power systems to operate seawater RO (SWRO) desalination systems using hybrid optimization model for electrical renewable (HOMER) software, were discussed.