Abstract
Arctic communities are suffering from food and energy shortages and their high logistic costs. An innovative ocean and solar-based energy, food, fuel, and water production system is developed for Arctic communities, including Nunavut's polar hamlets. The ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) with ammonia trilateral Rankine cycle, concentrated solar plant (CSP), bifacial photovoltaic (BiPV), cascaded heat pump, multi-effect desalination and polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) electrolyzer and fuel cell systems are integrated with hydrogen production and utilization and two tanks thermal energy storage systems. A food production system that includes a fish farm, a greenhouse, and a food drying facility is integrated into the system. Water and hydrogen productions are carried out with multi-effect desalination and PEM electrolyzer systems, respectively. Two primary integrations are considered for polar daytime and polar nighttime. The overall system- and its subsystems and components are extensively analyzed through various methods and simulations using the software packages. Both energy and exergy approaches are used to carry out thermodynamic analyses. The transient (time-dependent) analyses are carried out in order to present more detailed analyses with various ambient and operational parameters. Moreover, commercially available solar plant components and actual meteorological data from different databases are taken into account in order to provide more insightful results. The overall energy and exergy efficiencies for the average ambient conditions are found to be 16.28% and 36.35%, respectively.