Optimal territory of renewable fuel collection for cogeneration plant

Abstract

Secure and long-term supplies of low-cost feedstocks are critical to the economics of biomass power plants. Provided that the distribution of electricity and heat infrastructure already exists, cogeneration plant (CHP) costs depend mainly on the investment, biomass distribution density and price as well as biomass transportation cost. On sufficiently large space it is possible to operate with the average values of biomass density. The cost of transportation depends on the size of biomass collection territory, which monotonically increases with collection territory growth. The benefit index - ratio of CHP income to expanses - is the maximum at some optimum value of the territory. Proposed model of transportation cost allows optimizing the size of territory feeding the cogeneration plant with biomass.