Abstract
Developing biomass-based power generation is helpful for China to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels and to release the targets of carbon emission peak. The decentralized farming method leads to Chinese farmers’ weak willingness to collect and sell crop residues to biomass-based power plants. The purpose of this paper is to solve the issue by proposing a novel biomass feedstock supply model with China’s rural official organization—villagers’ committee, which has great influence on villagers’ decision making. Introducing it into the biomass-based power supply chain is beneficial to motivating farmers’ supplying enthusiasm. A combined game theory and agent-based simulation approach is applied to study the effectiveness of this new supply model. Multiple simulation scenarios are built to study impacts of different simulation parameters, and results show that farmers tend to supply more biomass material for electricity production in the proposed villagers’ committee model, compared with the two conventional supply models, direct-deal and broker models. The supply model incorporating the rural official organization can ensure the feedstock sufficiency for plants. A proper model design depends on the feed-in tariff subsidy for biomass-based electricity, feedstock shipping distance, performance appraisal system of the villagers’ committee, as well as farmers’ utility weights on net income and public service improvement.
Highlights
As the world’s largest greenhouse-gas (GHG) emitter [1], China commits to hit the carbon emission peak at around 2030, promising to make the best efforts to realize the target early
Based on the established agent-based models and the data collected within field investigations, we study the impacts of the proposed Villagers’ Committee Model (VCM) on straw supply and price, profit of the plant and the farmer’s utility, compared with the performances of the two conventional models, the Direct-Deal Model (DDM) and the Broker Model (BM)
Before the 10th month, straw supply, profit of the plant and the farmer’s utility in the DDM, as seen in Figure 6a–c, are all higher than those in the BM and the VCM, which are at quite low levels close to zero
Summary
As the world’s largest greenhouse-gas (GHG) emitter [1], China commits to hit the carbon emission peak at around 2030, promising to make the best efforts to realize the target early. Approved on 16 March 2016, China’s 13th Five-Year Plan explicitly indicates the promotion of optimizing and upgrading energy mix and the improvement of policy supporting for the power generation based on renewable energies, including wind and solar, as well as biomass [3]. Biomass-based generation is deemed as a promising utilization pathway of renewable energy in China because of its carbon neutrality feature [4], resource abundance [5,6] and its stability compared to other renewable power options, such as wind and solar [7]. With crop residues (e.g., wheat and rice straw, corn stover, and cotton stalk) as the major feedstock for China’s biomass-based power plants [11], the dominant small-scaled self-supporting agriculture in a decentralized method undermines farmers’ willingness to deliver raw materials. Without the consideration of important influences on farmers’ behaviors, the sustainable operation of the biomass-based power supply chain would be gloomy
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