A sustainable energy model focusing renewable energy: A case study for poultry farms in Bangladesh

Abstract

According to “Bangladesh Economic Rivew-2013”, the number of registered poultry farms in Bangladesh till February, 2013 is about 65902. This is believed to be more than two hundred thousand by non-government statistics. The number is increasing rapidly with the growing demand of protein and dependency on poultry-birds for this. Each and every farm draws certain amount of electric power. Most of these farms draw power from the national grid; some of them use natural gas or diesel generators and very few farms use their own poultry droppings for producing biogas and generating electricity. Unfortunately, these few biogas plants not even run to the peak of their capacity. The over reliance on national grid and fossil fuels aids to the emission of greenhouse gases and it is going to spiral up every year. If these poultry farms could produce sufficient energy from the poultry droppings then their annual costs, greenhouse gas emission as well as fossil fuel dependency will become nominal. The aim of this study is to reveal the prospect of self-sufficient poultry farms using their poultry droppings only. A comparison is made among the annual costs, energy efficiency and greenhouse gases emissions from different sources of energy or different mix of them. It is seen that coproduction of electricity and fertilizer optimize the mentioned constraints.