Ginta Cimdina, Dzintra Slisane, Jelena Ziemele, Valdis Vitolins, Girts Vigants, Dagnija Blumberga

Sustainable Development of Renewable Energy resources. Biomass Cogeneration Plant

View full text in PDF format

Abstract

Biomass cogeneration plants differ in terms of installed capacities, technological solutions, operational efficiency and other essential aspects. The use of wood-chips at cogeneration (CHP) plants brings up a range of issues that have to be solved simultaneously, not only when owners select the installed electrical and heat capacity, but also during plant operation, in order to secure maximum energy efficiency and loading. Two radically contradictory solutions are possible when choosing the installed capacity of CHP plants: compliance with the base load of the heating system, ensuring operation of the CHP plant for 4000 – 8000 hours/ year and compliance with the optimum heat load of the heating system during the whole year, providing heat to consumers until the moment when heat consumption starts decreasing. A methodology has been developed to enable a comparison of various alternative solutions for the purpose of analysing the efficiency of the use of primary energy resources. The multi-criteria based analysis methodology has been used to implement rating of alternative technological solutions of biomass CHP plants.The methodology was verified to analyse the development options for district heating system of the Jelgava city heat supply system. A comparison of three alternative solutions was performed. Results show that the highest rating is for large CHP operation in partly condensing regime than small scale cogeneration only for hot water supply load.

Keywords: cogeneration; biomass; multicriteria analysis.