Exergo-Ecological Assessment of Waste to Energy Plants Supported by Solar Energy

Barbara Mendecka, Lidia Lombardi, Paweł Gładysz and Wojciech Stanek
Additional contact information
Barbara Mendecka: Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Florence, 50121 Florence, Italy
Lidia Lombardi: Department of Engineering, Niccolo Cusano University of Rome, 00166 Rome, Italy
Paweł Gładysz: Faculty of Energy and Fuels, AGH University of Science and Technology, 30059 Krakow, Poland
Wojciech Stanek: Institute of Thermal Technology, Silesian University of Technology, 44100 Gliwice, Poland

Energies, 2018, vol. 11, issue 4, 1-20

Abstract: Hybridization of Waste to Energy (WtE) plants with solar facilities can take competing energy technologies and make them complementary. However, realizing the benefits of the solar integration requires careful consideration of its efficiency. To analyse such systems from the point of view of resource efficiency, the pure energy analysis is not sufficient since the quality of particular energy carriers is not evaluated. This work applies the exergo-ecological analysis using the concepts of thermoecological cost (TEC) and exergy cost for the performance evaluation of an integrated Solar-Waste to Energy plant scheme, where solar energy is used for steam superheating. Different plant layouts, considering several design steam parameters as well as different solar system configurations, in terms of area of heliostats and size of the thermal storage tank, were studied. The results for the solar integrated plant scheme were compared with the scenarios where superheating is performed fully by a non-renewable energy source. The presented results of exergy cost analysis indicate that the most favorable system is the one supported by non-renewable energy. Such an analysis does not consider the advantage of the use of renewable energy sources. By extending the system boundary to the level of natural resource and applying the thermoecological cost analysis, an opposite result was obtained.

Keywords: solar energy; WtE plant; exergy analysis; thermoecological cost (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/4/773/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/4/773/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:11:y:2018:i:4:p:773-:d:138533

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().