Abstract
The assessment of regional bioenergy potentials from different types of natural land cover is an integral part of simulation tools that aim to assess local renewable energy systems. This work introduces a new workflow, which evaluates regional bioenergy potentials and its impact on water demand based on geographical information system (GIS)-based land use data, satellite maps on local crop types and soil types, and conversion factors from biomass to bioenergy. The actual annual biomass yield of crops is assessed through an automated process considering the factors of local climate, crop type, soil, and irrigation. The crop biomass yields are validated with historic statistical data, with deviation less than 7% in most cases. Additionally, the resulting bioenergy potentials yield between 10.7 and 12.0 GWh/ha compared with 13.3 GWh/ha from other studies. The potential contribution from bioenergy on the energy demand were investigated in the two case studies, representing the agricultural-dominant rural area in North Germany and suburban region in South Germany: Simulation of the future bioenergy potential for 2050 shows only smaller effects from climate change (less than 4%) and irrigation (below 3%), but the potential to cover up to 21% of the transport fuels demand in scenario supporting biodiesel and bioethanol for transportation.
Highlights
The metabolism of industrial societies strongly relies on minerals and fossilized biomass, annually harvested biomass from vegetation contributes about 10% to primary energy use in the European Union [1]
In the newly established workflow the advantages of two tools are combined: SimStadt assesses regional energy potentials and demands primarily based on geoinformatic data, and AquaCrop simulates biomass yields and water demands based on soil types, crop types, and climate situations [50]
The methodology and workflow presented in this paper present a novel, generic method to evaluate bioenergy potentials for any region with good accuracy, by simultaneously considering constraints of water availability, climate, and soil
Summary
The metabolism of industrial societies strongly relies on minerals and fossilized biomass, annually harvested biomass from vegetation contributes about 10% to primary energy use in the European Union [1]. In decentralized and renewable energy systems, bioenergy can play important roles in fueling the parts of the transport sector that cannot be electrified, or in securing controllable electricity supply that can counteract fluctuations of intermittent wind and photovoltaic power sources [2]. It is important to assess regional biomass potentials and to understand the possible variables that might influence the potential in order to help local governments and planning authorities to make informed choices regarding. The resource focused assessment is adapted in this paper, which takes the form of inventories of potential bioenergy sources, with an evaluation of possibilities to utilize the sources for energy purpose [3]. The method needs to be reasonably accurate in the context of local energy systems and build upon a similar data structure as the methods already implemented, such as assessments of rooftop photovoltaic (PV) potentials [4] or the energy demand for heating on the city quarter level [5], but it does not need to be able to compete with specialized tools that focus for example solely on assessing local potentials of one RES
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