Abstract
In recent years, due to the rise in petroleum prices and greenhouse gas emissions, renewable energy has been recommended as a power source for different types of facilities. For the period 2010 to 2020 the European Commission has established three key objectives related to climatic change and energy sustainability, such as reductions of CO2 emissions, increases in the use of renewable energy, and improvements in energy efficiency. A key industry is olive oil production in olive mills, where there is a great opportunity to reduce electricity consumption, increase additional profits related to the reduction of technologies that are harmful to the environment, and to cut back maintenance costs. For this reason, a feasibility study of grid-connected photovoltaics (PV) systems has been carried out for different types of olive mills in Andalusia (southern Spain). This region is highly energy dependent, but has an abundance of “green” resources to be exploited. The results of this study contemplate a reduction in spending on electrical power of between 2% and 37%, and an increase in the use of renewable energy of between 2% and 26%. These results are according to the self-consumption or net metering policy and the production capacity of olive oil.
Highlights
At national and global levels, the political strategies in energy are a priority, especially in the use of renewable energy sources for the generation of electricity, heat, or biofuels [1]
HOMER simulates all the search space system configurations and outputs the feasible systems in increasing order according to their Net Present Cost (NPC)
The optimization results for the olive mills powered by grid connected photovoltaic systems are shown in Table 6, where the electrical power limit that must be contracted from the electricity company depending on the type of oil mill is indicated
Summary
At national and global levels, the political strategies in energy are a priority, especially in the use of renewable energy sources for the generation of electricity, heat, or biofuels [1]. At the end of the 20th century, the photovoltaic systems were seen as an environmentally friendly option to generate electricity [2], but the evolution during the first years of the 21th century was exponential: from 1.6 GW of global PV installed capacity in 2000 to 138.9 GW in 2013 [3]. PV energy is one of the renewable energy resources widely used in the agriculture sector for various applications [4,5], such as water pumping systems for irrigation, or electricity generation for the agro-food sector [6,7], but it is not widely used for olive oil production. Olive oil is a crucial industry in the agro-food sector in Europe since it provides approximately 73%
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