ADVANTAGES OF COMBINED WIND-BIOGAS ENERGY UTILIZATION FOR DISTRIBUTED POWER GENERATION

ABSTRACT

The Kyoto protocol, although not ratified to the extent intended, has become a major issue for governments worldwide. Concern over global warming and the effect of pollution caused by the burning of “brown” fuels cannot be neglected.

Power generation systems using renewable resources — the wind, sun, water, solid biomass, biogas-syngas and geothermal energy do not produce greenhouse gases and emit far less pollution than burning “brown” fuels to generate electricity.

However, renewable energy technologies also have some disadvantages. Solar and wind power are intermittent — they don't produce power if the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. This can be mitigated through the use of combined, hybrid, systems.

One possible solution for small-distributed power generation systems may be a combination of biogas-syngas fuelled combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power plant with a wind turbine-generator (called in this paper “Hybrid Power Plants”).

Depending on biogas-syngas production capacity and average available wind power, 10 MW to 15 MW units can be build.

Syngas can be produced from solid biomass in a gasifier, biogas by anaerobic digesting food or animal wastes or from landfills that also generate a methane-rich biogas from the decay of wastes containing biomass.

Small, modular, hybrid power plants, which can be sited close to the end-user load centers, offer advantages that large-scale, centralized power plants can’t provide.

Distributed hybrid power plants avoid transmission and distribution power losses, and provide safe and reliable power source to the end-user.

Hybrid, biogas/syngas – wind, distributed power generation systems produce so little emissions that they can be located immediately adjacent to the consumer where the power is needed.

The excess power can be fed to midi grids that supply power from distributed power generation sources to a localized group of end-users. 

Study performed by IMTE shows a great potential for small renewable hybrid distributed power generation plants worldwide.

However, in many countries, the renewable energy generation is not competitive at present market conditions. Therefore, subsidies in the form of guaranteed higher tariffs, soft loans and other technical and commercial support is required.

Worldwide great efforts are made to develop technologies, which can use surplus residual biomass products from agriculture and forestry and also from municipal waste as a fuel at power plants.

Investment in renewable power energy generation is considered as a great challenge for each modern Investor and Project Developer. Topics related to this subject are analyzed and discussed in this paper.