Abstract
This paper presents a methodology for analyzing the regional potential for developing biomass district heating systems combining forestry biomass and agriculture residues as fuel. As a case study, this methodology is applied to the continental region of Spain. With this analysis the potential for the implementation of biomass district heating systems based on the use of agriculture residues is applied to 501 rural municipalities in Spain. The renewable forestry biomass and agriculture residues resources availability is analyzed and the biomass required for heating is assessed. The results of applying the methodology show the interest of the combination of biomass sources in a relevant number of municipalities with estimated Internal Rate of Return (IRR) values above 10% and for the analyzed region an IRR mean value of 4.3%.
Highlights
One of the key factors to control global warming is to improve the energy efficiency at residential areas, one of the large energy consumption sectors
Systems based on renewable biomass forestry and agricultural residues is presented. This methodology has been applied, as case study, to the continental region of Spain in order to evaluate the potential of a biomass district heating systems (BioDH) network in this region and how it is influenced by considering agriculture and forest biomass
From the analysis is derived that for this region, and under the current local agriculture residues production, the profitability is not highly improved with the use of available resource of agricultural biomass. This is mainly due to the reduced availability of agriculture biomass that combined with exploitation costs of agriculture biomass not significantly lower than the forest biomass costs results in only a slight increase of Internal Rate of Return in most of the municipalities analyzed
Summary
One of the key factors to control global warming is to improve the energy efficiency at residential areas, one of the large energy consumption sectors. There will be different requirements to fulfil from social, legal and economic points of view depending on location that will affect to their viability and sustainability On this sense a first general classification for DHC systems can be done in terms of the implantation area: urban, rural and industrial. Agricultural residues have been obviated in previous studies but they present an interesting potential as fuel [11,12] The combination of both biomass sources may improve the economic profitability of BioDH systems by using as much as possible the local biomass resources available in the area where the network is installed. In this paper is established a methodology for the assessment of the potential of a massive implementation of BioDH systems in a region It takes into account the simultaneous evaluation of the forest and agricultural biomass resources in a given area.
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