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The widening gap between consumption and availability of water poses a serious threat to a sustainable socioeconomic development of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries and calls for an even larger augmentation of water supply using seawater desalination. However, these plants are affected by high specific energy consumption, while the uncertainty about fossil fuel prices in the future represents a severe problem. Within this study long-term scenarios for water and electricity demand based on potential assessment of renewable energies have been developed. The results provide baseline information for decision makers for the establishment of a favourable framework for the deployment of concentrated solar power and desalination plants. Finally, this paper points out the importance to start a paradigm change in water and electricity supply as soon as possible, in order to meet the requirements for low cost water and electricity and to avoid conflicts related to water scarcity.

Flexibility requirements in prospective energy systems will increase to balance intermittent electricity generation from renewable energies. One option to tackle this problem is electricity storage. Its demand quantification often relies on optimization models for thermal and renewable dispatch and capacity expansion. Within these tools, power plant modeling is typically based on simplified linear programming merit order dispatch (LP) or mixed integer unit-commitment with economic dispatch (MILP). While the latter is able to capture techno-economic characteristics to a large extent (e.g. ramping or start-up costs) and allows on/off decision of generator units, LP is a simplified method, but superior in computational effort.We present an assessment of how storage expansion is affected by the method of power plant modeling and apply a cost minimizing optimization model, comparing LP with MILP. Moreover, we evaluate the influence of wind and photovoltaic generation shares and vary the granularity of the power plant mix within MILP.The results show that LP underestimates storage demand, as it neglects technical restrictions which affect operating costs, leading to an unrealistically flexible thermal power plant dispatch. Contrarily, storage expansion is higher in MILP. The deviation between both approaches however becomes less pronounced if the share of renewable generation increases.