Abstract
The present work aims to investigate the integration into renewable energy communities (REC) schemes of micro and mini- Combined Heat and Power (CHP) plants. In detail, it has been evaluated the minimum self-consumption (SC) share needed to even out the revenues coming from the energy efficiency certificates (EECs). In order to establish a SC based tariff for CHP plants a correlation between SC share and the tariff value has been assessed for different commercial plants. A 70% of SC share has been set as a minimum target, which is related to incentive rates of 53 and 39.5 €/MWh, for mini and micro-CHPs, respectively. These values are about 65% lower than the current tariffs set by ARERA (Italian Regulatory Authority for Energy, Networks and Environment) to reward the renewable energy SC. A real building and two CHP plants have been considered as reference case studies. A dynamic simulation has been carried out in order to analyse the proposed incentive scheme in a real application. Starting from a 3-D BIM model, the energy flows have been calculated over one year period. Finally, it has been demonstrated how a SC based tariff can significantly reduce the share of injected electricity into the grid, also promoting the thermal carrier sharing. In so doing, the renewable energy sources intermittency can be easily mitigated and balanced, avoiding additional burdens on public expenditure.
Highlights
With the introduction of the European Directive 2018/2001 (RED II) it has been established a common system to promote energy from renewable sources
Once the tariff has been set, if the CHP plant was managed in such a way to get a SCR higher than 70%, the total revenues will be higher than those obtained by the efficiency certificates (EECs) mechanism
A CHP plant that injects a lot of electricity into the grid and has a SCR less than 70%, it will receive lower revenues than those from previous incentive mechanism
Summary
With the introduction of the European Directive 2018/2001 (RED II) it has been established a common system to promote energy from renewable sources. Renewable Energy Sources (RES) are crucial to mitigate climate change effects [1]. RES are variable and non-programmable sources, and their increase will require different solutions to improve system flexibility and to balance the power grid [2]. Even in small-scale energy systems, the system flexibility has to be increased in order to integrate high shares of variable RES [3][4]. To balance the local power grid, CHP (Combined Heat and Power) plants are an interesting option [5][6][7]. CHP plants are a widely used commercial technology [8]. Different alternative fuels [9][10], like biomass [11] and hydrogen [12], are decreasing the environmental impact of these devices [13][14]
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