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A seawater desalination plant with an average daily drinking water production of 1.000 m3/d is planned by imb+frings watersystems and Synlift for an island in the Arabian Gulf. The plant is supplied by a stand alone 750 kW wind energy plant as on grid. The water treatment plant with open intake is planned with ultrafiltration as pretreatment and reverse osmosis. The water will be stored in an 1.500 m³ storage tank for drinking water. For a successful introduction of wind energy in ADE it is therefore suggested, to implement projects in 2004–2005. The 750 kW wind energy plant will be started up in August 2004. SYNWATER — wind powered ground- or seawater treatment will present a sustainable state-of-the-art technology with example character for the entire Gulf region. A reverse osmosis (RO) plant with an average daily drinking water production of 0.8–3 m3/d was installed on Gran Canaria Island. The plant is supplied by a stand alone 4.8 kWp photovoltaic (PV) system with an additional battery storage of 60 kWh. The installation constitutes the smallest PV supplied seawater desalination plant currently in operation. On behalf of this prototype the feasibility of small PV-RO systems (1–5 m3/d) is being investigated. The technical details of the RO plant and the energy supply are presented briefly and the operation strategies of the system are presented. Three different regulation strategies for the energy management of the plant are compared and recommendations for an optimised operation are given.

RO plants for the desalination of brackish water and seawater are becoming more and more important to cover the increasing drinking water demand in semiarid regions in the Near East, North-western Africa and on small islands. The feasibility of these plants supplied by own power stations or the electric grid is indisputable. Within this paper, three different operation strategies for a better adaptation of RO plants to a renewable energy supply have been presented.